Prevalence of tobacco use

In 2019, approximately 1.14 billion people across the world smoked tobacco regularly, with an approximate 8 million deaths estimated attributable to this smoking.^[1] The 2019 Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Tobacco Collaborators highlight the importance of the findings of the 2019 GBD study, and the differences in health risks across countries that are attributable to heterogenous smoking patterns.^[1] The authors see this as an urgent call to policymakers across the globe to enforce tobacco-control policies, and to prepare for the future healthcare-system strain that will be caused by the level of smoking.^[1]

Reference:
[1] GBD 2019 Tobacco Collaborators. Spatial, temporal, and demographic patterns in prevalence of smoking tobacco use and attributable disease burden in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019. Lancet 2021; 397 (10292): 2337–2360.