New York, May 30 -- Tobacco use continues to claim around eight million lives a year, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday, in a call for faster action from governments to tackle smoking and the enormous health, social, environmental and economic costs it entails.
Ahead of World No Tobacco Day, marked on Friday, 31 May, WHOs Dr Vinayak Prasad, acting Director, Department for the Prevention of Noncommunicable Diseases, highlighted the damage that tobacco causes to the lungs of smokers and non-smokers alike. He warned that 3.3 million tobacco-related deaths - more than 40 per cent of the total - come from lung diseases, such as cancer, chronic respiratory diseases and tuberculosis. We want to highlight the huge scale of toba...