India's smoking epidemic will kill a million a year: study

0 Comments | AFP, February, 2008

CHICAGO (AFP) — India is in the midst of a smoking epidemic which will kill about a million people annually, accounting for nearly one in every 10 deaths from 2010, researchers said Wednesday.

Some 70 percent of those people will die before they reach the age of 70, according to the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"I am alarmed by the results of this study," India's Health Minister Abumani Ramadoss said in a statement.

"The government of India is trying to take all steps to control tobacco use -- in particular by informing the many poor and illiterate of smoke risks."

The first nationally representative study of smoking habits and associated mortality rates found that some 120 million Indians smoke, although they generally...