Passive Smoking Kills 600,000 Per Year: WHO sStudy

A hundred deaths worldwide caused by passive smoking, which kills about 600,000 people a year, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Friday researchers.

In the first study to assess the overall impact of passive smoking, WHO experts found that children are more exposed to passive smoking than any other age group, and about 165,000 of them die each year because of that.

"Two thirds of these deaths occur in Africa and South Asia," the researchers, led by Annette Pruss-Ustun of WHO in Geneva, wrote in their study.

Children's exposure to tobacco smoke are more likely to occur at home, and double the impact of infectious diseases and tobacco, "seems to be a lethal combination of children in these areas," they said.

Commenting on the findings in the journal The Lancet, Heather Wipfli, and Jonathan Samet from the University of Southern California said the decision-makers to try to motivate families to stop smoking in the house.

WHO researchers examined data from 192 countries for their study. To obtain complete data for all 192, they had to go back to 2004. They used mathematical modeling to estimate the death and years lost their lives in good health.

Worldwide, 40 percent of children, 33 percent of male non-smokers and 35 percent of women non-smokers exposed to passive smoking in 2004, they found.

This exposure is estimated to have caused 379 000 deaths from heart disease, 165,000 lower respiratory infections, asthma and lung cancer 36 900 21 400.

For the full impact of the consumption of snuff, deaths must be added to the 5.1 million annual deaths attributable to active smoking, the researchers said.

Although deaths from passive smoking in children is tilted toward middle-income and poor countries, deaths among adults are divided between countries at all income levels.

Europe in high-income countries, only 71 child deaths occurred, 35 388 deaths in adults. Yet the country is estimated in Africa, about 43 375 deaths due to passive smoking in children than in adults 9514.

Pruss-Ustun urged countries to implement the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which includes high tobacco taxes, plain packaging and advertising is prohibited, among other measures.