Please try harder to quit - We love you enough... do you?
Tobacco Free Initiative: publications
Smoking FACT's:
- Tobacco use will drain nearly 20% of the household income of smokers' families
- Smoking related-diseases kill one in 10 adults globally, or cause four million deaths. By 2030, if current trends continue, smoking will kill one in six people.
- Smoking is the single largest preventable cause of disease and premature death. It is a prime factor in heart disease, stroke and chronic lung disease.
- More than 4,000 toxic or carcinogenic chemicals have been found in tobacco smoke.
- One British survey found that nearly 99% of women did not know of the link between smoking and cervical cancer.
- One survey found that 60% of Chinese adults did not know that smoking can cause lung cancer while 96% were unaware it can cause heart disease.
- At least a quarter of all deaths from heart diseases and about three-quarters of world's chronic bronchitis are related to smoking.
- Smoking-related diseases cost the United States more than $150 billion a year.
- 46 million Americans (20.6 percent) are current cigarette smokers in 2008,and indicate an alarming trend, because smoking is the leading preventable cause of death, killing more than 443,000 people every year and costing the nation $96 billion in health care costs annually.
A $500 Billion Hole in Global Economy - The global economy lost a staggering US$500 billion due to tobacco use. These economic costs come as a result of lost productivity, misused resources, missed opportunities for taxation, and premature death.
* Because 25 percent of smokers die and many more become ill during their most productive years, income loss devastates families and communities.
* Cigarettes are the world's most widely smuggled legal consumer product. In 2006, about 600 billion smuggled cigarettes made it to the market, representing an enormous missed tax opportunity for governments, as well as a missed opportunity to prevent many people from starting to smoke and encourage others to quit.
* Tobacco replaces potential food production on almost 4 million hectares of the world's agricultural land, equal to all of the world's orange groves or banana plantations.
* In developing countries, smokers spend disproportionate sums of money relative to their incomes that could otherwise be spent on food, healthcare, and other necessities.
Burden Shift to the World's Poorest Countries... read full at ScienceDaily
