Smoking Causes 10% of Deaths Globally, Major Study Finds

Globally, 10 Percent of Deaths Are Caused by Smoking

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Where there’s smoke there’s a major global health crisis.

According to The Guardian, a major new study has revealed that one in 10 deaths worldwide can be attributed to smoking.

As of 2015, the story notes, the estimated number of smokers was approaching one billion, with one in four men and one in 20 women regular tobacco users. In that year alone, there 6.4 million deaths attributed directly to smoking—50 percent of which occurred in the U.S., China, India, and Russia.

Despite the grim statistics, the world has been doing quite a bit to curb the smoking epidemic. According to the study, published in medical journal The Lancet, “between 1990 and 2015, smoking prevalence dropped from 35 percent to 25 percent among men and eight percent to five percent among women, per The Guardian.

“The toll of tobacco is likely to be much larger if we include occasional smokers and former smokers and people who use other tobacco products like smokeless tobacco,” Dr. Emmanuela Gakidou, the study’s senior authbor, told the publication. “This is on the low end of how important tobacco is.”

Read the full article in the Guardian here.

Watch what happens when you stop smoking below.