NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Smoking or chewing tobacco has caused a sharp rise in deaths worldwide, with more than 3.5 million people dying each year. Leading countries are India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Twenty-five percent of the world’s tobacco consumption is consumed annually in three South Asian countries, with India accounting for 70 percent, Pakistan 7 percent and Bangladesh 5 percent.
A recent report states that the death toll from tobacco has tripled globally in the last seven years. Interestingly, experts at York University conducted the study in the context of the Corona epidemic, which examined people’s spitting habits.
In the Indian subcontinent, there is a common trend of smoking and spitting, which could be more dangerous in the current Corona epidemic. This is because if a corona patient chews tobacco and continues to spit, the risk of spreading the disease is doubled.
Dr. Kamran Siddiqui, an expert at York University, has called for a ban on spitting in public places. Tobacco use increases saliva in the mouth which requires frequent spitting and thus increases the spread of corona virus.
The National Institutes of Health Research said in 2017 that 90,000 people die of oral, throat and esophageal cancer each year from smoking. The death toll from heart and other diseases has been put at 258,000, but is now rising sharply.
Details of the study are published in the latest issue of Biomed Central, which collects data from 127 countries and draws on global tobacco surveys. Of these, 25% is used in only three countries: Pakistan, Bangladesh and India.
Experts have studied strict rules and restrictions to discourage this trend.