Discount Cigarettes News
Jan 11th, 2008 - 10:40:53
At a media interactive session in Lagos recently, the group said tobacco consumption was accountable for over 200 million deaths around the world with prospects of the toll tripling by 2025. The number of smokers, it said, was on the increase each day, and about 15 billion tobacco sticks are smoked across the globe each day. CAT said tobacco killed 100 million people in the 20th century and if current trends continue, would kill one billion people in this 21st century, adding that almost one billion men (35% in developed counties and 50% in developing countries) and 250 million women (22% of women in developed countries and 9% in developing countries) smoke cigarettes. Quoting World Health Organisation (WHO) 2006 statistics, the coalition said about 5.4 million persons die from tobacco-related diseases each year, one person dies in every 6.5 seconds, equivalent to one Boeing 747 Jumbo jet crashing every hour, adding that 110,000 of these deaths each year are recorded in sub-Saharan Africa, with not less than two each day from government run health facilities in Lagos alone. The group added that tobacco companies lure youths into smoking through seductive and misleading advertorials and concerts, pointing at a tobacco company in Nigeria as being in the habit of supplying free cigarettes to youths at such concerts to get them addicted at a young age so as to make them life-long smokers, thus increasing smoking rate in Nigeria and the developing countries by 20% each year when lower rates are being recorded in the developed countries. consumption has deadly health implications not only to the direct consumers but on unsuspecting third parties like their spouse, children and people around the environment where they smoke. It identified cancer as the second leading cause of death and among the first diseases casually linked to smoking; as there are 4,000 known chemicals in tobacco smoke with 50 of them known to cause cancer. Such known cancer cases, it said, include cancers of the heart, bladder, oral cavity, pharynx, larynx (voice box), esophagus, cervix, kidney, lung, pancreas and stomach. The Coalition Against Tobacco averred that tobacco companies were shifting their focus on developing countries like Nigeria, taking advantage of the weak, porous and almost non-existent regulatory mechanisms to propagate the sale, advertisement and distribution of these lethal products in the most callous manner, as a result of legal actions, liabilities and stricter control measures against the sale, distribution and use of cigarettes in profitable markets like USA and Europe. © Copyright 2006 by DiscountCigarettesBox.Com Top of Page |
