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Anti-tobacco campaign in Calcutta, India (archive image)
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The world is getting rid of tobacco addiction more and more.
Despite the increase in the world population, the number of tobacco users is falling continuously, as the World Health Organization (WHO) reported in Geneva on Tuesday.
She expects the trend to take hold.
Among the 15 to 24 year olds, the proportion of tobacco users fell from 20.8 percent to 14.2 percent between 2000 and 2020.
In 2025 it will probably only be 13 percent.
According to the WHO Trend Report, there were 1.3 billion tobacco users aged 15 and over worldwide last year.
Five years earlier it was 1.32 billion.
During the same period, the world population grew from around 7.3 to 7.8 billion.
The WHO anticipates a decline to 1.27 billion tobacco users in 2025. It estimates the proportion of tobacco users in the world population aged 15 and over to be 22.3 percent in 2020.
In Germany, according to WHO information, it is 19.6 percent.
Worldwide, 36.7 percent of all men used the products and 7.8 percent of all women, in Germany in 2020 it was 22.3 percent of men and 17.1 percent of women.
Smoking, sniffing, sucking, chewing
Tobacco use includes smoking cigarettes, cigars and pipes, but also snuff, sucking or chewing tobacco.
More than 90 percent of tobacco users are smokers.
Some of the smokers also chew, suck or sniff tobacco.
Electronic cigarettes that do not contain tobacco are not included in the report.
According to WHO data, there are no surveys from too many countries for statements about global distribution.
The WHO worries about the European region, which includes 53 countries to Turkmenistan and Israel.
18 percent of women here still consumed tobacco, significantly more than in other regions, and the proportion is only slowly falling.
In Western Europe, according to the WHO figures for 2020, tobacco consumption was rather low in Iceland (11.9 percent) and Great Britain (14.3), while in France (28.7) and Spain (24.5) it was rather high.
Germany is in the middle of the field.
Tobacco industry wants to defend profits
According to WHO data, seven million people die every year as a result of their tobacco consumption, and 1.2 million non-smokers die because they get tobacco smoke from others.
"We still have a long way to go," said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
"The tobacco industry will use every trick to defend the gigantic profits they make from the sale of their deadly products." The WHO recommends advice from general practitioners on the increase in quality of life without tobacco as well as free hotlines and SMS services for supporting tobacco users in the process of quitting.
In this way alone, around 88 million people worldwide could get away from tobacco consumption by 2030 and 1.4 million human lives could be saved.
he / dpa