The global proportion of adults who smoke has fallen sharply in the past 25 years, but tobacco firms are pushing hard to reverse progress and attract the young, according to the World Health Organization.
A new report from the United Nations health body said around one-in-five adults were smokers or used other tobacco products in 2022, compared to one-in-three at the start of the century.
The fall shows some 150 countries are using a mix of regulation, high taxes and public health campaigns to cut rates.
Yet despite the fall, the world will miss its goal of a 30-per cent drop in tobacco use between 2010 and 2025.
Some 56 countries are on track to hit the target, including the UK, but at least six, including the Republic of Congo, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Moldova and Oman, are still seeing rates rise.
Tobacco use had fallen fastest in Africa and South East Asia, but the latter and Europe remain the regions where people are most likely to smoke. The prevalence in South East Asia is 24.6 per cent and is 24.4 per cent in Europe.
‘Criminal efforts’
Tobacco is still estimated to kill more than eight million people each year, including an estimated 1.3 million non-smokers who breathe in second-hand smoke.
The time taken for smoking-related diseases to develop means it will take decades for deaths to fall in line with smoking rates.
The WHO also said that tobacco firms were also attempting to slow, or reverse countries’ progress.
They are using “what I would personally call criminal efforts,” Ruediger Krech, director of the WHO’s health promotion department, told reporters in Geneva.
“They are killing, and they continue to do everything possible to undermine the countries’ very good efforts.”
Smoking firms deny targeting young people, but Mr Krech said tobacco products come in “thousands of flavours” and “most of them are attractive to children: vanilla ice cream, gummy bears”.
He said: “Good progress has been made in tobacco control in recent years,” Krech said in a statement, “but there is no time for complacency”.
“I’m astounded at the depths the tobacco industry will go to pursue profits at the expense of countless lives.
“We see that the minute a government thinks they have won the fight against tobacco, the tobacco industry seizes the opportunity to manipulate health policies and sell their deadly products.”
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