Concerns over youngsters smoking

More than 32 percent of Jordanian students between the ages of 13 and 15 currently use some kind of tobacco product, according to a story in The Jordan Times citing figures from ‘The Status Quo of Tobacco Control in Jordan Report’.

According to the report and the World Health Organization, the prevalence of tobacco use among Jordan’s ‘teenage boys’ is 44.5 percent.

The prevalence of tobacco use among ‘girls’, meanwhile, is 22.2 percent. But while this figure is only half that of ‘teenage boys’, it is considerably higher than the global average for ‘adolescent girls’ – eight percent.

According to Omar Nimri, head of the National Cancer Registry, the number of cancer cases registered in Jordan reached 7,454 by the end of 2012, with 5,013 of the patients being Jordanian and the rest being non-Jordanians residing in the Kingdom.

Lung cancer, with 292 cases, tops the list of cancers among men in Jordan, while the equivalent number for women is 78.