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India's smoking epidemic described as "catastrophic"
A new study suggests that by 2010, India's death toll due to tobacco smoking will be about 1 million people a year, taking the country's smoking epidemic to catastrophic proportions.
According the study, published inline this week in The New England Journal of Medicine, this will represent one fifth of deaths in men and one twentieth of deaths in women aged 39 to 69, causing deaths from tuberculosis, cancer, cardiovascular disease and respiratory disease.
In India today, about 5% of women and more than one third of men aged between 30 and 69 smoke either conventional cigarettes or bidis - an Asian cigarette made with about a quarter of the amount of tobacco in a normal cigarette and wrapped in the leaves of a temburni plant.
Men who smoke bidis die about six years earlier than men who do not smoke, women about eight years earlier. The figure is ten years for me who smoke conventional cigarettes.
The Indian government is apparently trying to educate its population about the dangers of smoking - it seems that even a few cigarettes or bidis a day can double the risk of death in middle age.
