Singapore (Reuters) – the habit of smoking costs the world of a 1 to 2 percent of its Gross domestic product every year and could kill nearly one billion people this century, said the authors of the fourth edition of the Atlas of tobacco, during the launch of the book in Singapore.
Economic losses include direct and indirect costs such as medical costs to treat smoking-related diseases and the value of the lost productivity, said the authors of the book, published by the society American cancer and the World Lung Foundation.
The cost of smoking could be even greater, as maintains it one of the authors of the book, Hana Ross, saying that they are difficult to measure intangible costs as the suffering of members of the family or the pain felt by patients.
“During the 20th century, smoking killed 100 million people.” “It is estimated that in the 21st century you will kill 1 billion people,” said the lead author of the book, Michael Eriksen, in the presentation during a global Conference of health in Singapore.
The world’s population has grown more than four times in the last century, surpassing the 7 billion people last year.
Eriksen said that there are about 1 billion smokers worldwide and 360,000 passive smokers die each year from exposure to smoke, of which 75 per cent are women and children.
China is by far the largest consumer of cigarettes in the world, with 38 per cent of smokers worldwide in 2009. The country experienced an increase of more than four times to 28,900 million dollars (22,100 million euros), costs related to the consumption of cigarettes between 2000 and 2008, stated the authors in the book.
“China has a big problem because the tobacco industry is part of the Government,” said co-author Judith Mackay, pointing out the extent of Beijing to raise taxes on tobacco two years ago the purchase price of cigarettes has not changed that, but hardly transformed the way in which taxes are paid to the Government.
