Tobacco disease set to rise in Asia

Research has indicated that inadequate public awareness of the risks of tobacco smoking and aggressive tobacco marketing have left Asian nations with some of the highest smoking rates, according to a story by Giles Hewitt for Yahoo News.

Roughly 60 percent of the world’s population lived in Asia where tobacco control programs were less well-developed than they were in the US and Europe, which had lowered smoking rates with sustained anti-smoking campaigns, said a major regional study published in PLOS Medicine.

Such tobacco control programs were particularly unsophisticated in low- and middle-income countries such as China and India.

And even in developed countries such as Japan and South Korea, it was only recently that the authorities had made genuine moves to cut smoking rates that were once as high as 85 percent among adult males.

“Many Asian countries are in the early stages of the tobacco epidemic,” said the PLOS study.

“So it is likely that the burden of diseases caused by tobacco smoking will continue to rise over the next few decades, and much longer if the tobacco epidemic remains unchecked,” it said.