Smoking rates fall for first time in a long time - report

A woman smokes a cigarette in Ajaccio on December 16, 2021 on the French Mediterranean island of Corsica. PASCAL POCHARD-CASABIANCA AFP LONDON - Smoking rates have declined for the first time in a long time, according to a new report on tobacco use from a public health campaign group and US academics.

The Tobacco Atlas figures show that the authors also mask rising numbers of smokers in parts of the world and increasing tobacco use among young teens in more than half of the countries surveyed, according to the figures from the Tobacco Atlas report.

There are 1.1 billion smokers and 200 million more people who use other tobacco products, according to the report from Vital Strategies and the Tobacconomics team at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The smoking rate was down from 22.6 percent of people in 2007 to 19.6 percent in 2019, the first since the report began in 2002.

The report said that there were still increasing numbers of smokers in a number of areas because of the increase in population growth in Africa, the eastern Mediterranean and the western Pacific. Prevalence is rising among adults in at least 10 countries in Africa, as well as among young people.

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Jeffrey Drope, a professor at the University of Illinois, said the industry is still preying on emerging economies in ways that will lock in harms for a generation or more.

He said that children were targeted in a number of countries, resulting in a rise in smoking among teenagers aged 13 -- 15 in 63 of 135 countries surveyed. He said that around 50 million people in this age group, both boys and girls, are now using tobacco products, and the impact of new products like e-cigarettes and flavoured products is not yet fully understood.

Drope said that there was evidence of the effectiveness of strong tobacco control measures, such as increased taxes, but many lower-income countries didn't have tough enough restrictions in place.

In the year 2019 tobacco use caused almost 8.7 million deaths and about $2 trillion in economic damage, according to the data. More than half of the deaths are currently in high-income countries, but this is expected to change if cigarette use continues to rise in lower-income areas.

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The report also shows that the tobacco industry is targeting black people in the United States with menthol cigarette promotion. The authors backed the US Food and Drug Administration's plan to ban their sale.