Passive smoking kills 165,000 children a year

PASSIVE smoking claims more than 600,000 lives each year around the world, with children most heavily exposed.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) study found around 165,000 children die each year because of exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke.

Based on 2004 data, the figures show smoking in that year killed almost six million people, either actively or passively.

Second-hand smoke was believed to have caused 379,000 deaths from heart disease, 165,000 from respiratory infections, 36,900 from asthma and 21,400 from lung cancer.

The findings are published in an online edition of The Lancet medical journal.

Dr Annette Pruss-Ustun, from the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, and her fellow authors wrote: “Exposure to second-hand smoke is still one of the most common indoor pollutants worldwide.

“On the basis of the proportions of second-hand smoke exposure, as many as 40% of children, 35% of women and 33% of men are regularly exposed to second-hand smoke indoors.

“We have estimated that second-hand smoke caused 603,000 deaths worldwide in 2004, corresponding to 1% of all deaths.

“These deaths should be added to the estimated 5.1 million deaths attributable to active smoking to obtain the full effect of both passive and active smoking.

“Smoking, therefore, was responsible for more than 5.7 million deaths every year in 2004.”

The figures were obtained by analysing data from disease incidence studies and smoking surveys. They showed that chest infections in children younger than five, heart disease in adults, and asthma in both adults and children represented the biggest health impacts from passive smoking.

The vast majority of deaths among children occurred in poor and middle-income countries, while in richer nations the proportion of adult casualties was higher.

In Africa, an estimated 43,375 children but only 9,514 adults were killed by inhaling second-hand smoke.

This compared with 71 child deaths and 35,388 deaths among adults in the high-income countries of Europe.

The WHO study collected data from 192 countries.