Secondhand smoking kills more women than men
Nearly 600 000 women died from secondhand smoke-related deaths in 2016, more than double the number of men during the same period, according to the Atlas, which collates global and country-based tobacco statistics and is published every three years.
Far more men than women smoke worldwide, but many women get exposed to smoke from their partners.
A recent South African study of two communities in the Western Cape found that over a third of the pregnant women in Mbekweni township – 200 out of 584 – were exposed to passive smoking.
The researchers at the Drakenstein Child Health Study (DCHS) found that the high rate of passive smokers was because of overcrowding in the informal settlement and more people sharing a sleeping room in a single household.
“We were alarmed by the high household tobacco smoke exposure and also by the fact that 18% of infants were born with urine nicotine levels suggestive of active smoking,” said researcher Dr Aneesa Vanker.
“Despite, strict anti-tobacco smoking laws (ban on advertising and smoking in public places), smoking in homes is uncontrolled,” says Dr Vanker.
Non-smoking women at risk
In many populations, home environments are the main places where women and children are exposed to nicotine gasses, according to the 6th Tobacco Atlas, and people from lower socioeconomic groups and non-smoking women are particularly at risk.
The Tobacco Atlas shows that in 2016 alone there were an estimated 884,000 secondhand smoke related deaths in the world, while more than 6 million people die every year from smoking tobacco.
Tobacco smoke exposure is linked to many serious health problems and in severe instances leads to death. Some of the notable effects are among young children and unborn babies as respiratory diseases caused by passive smoke contribute substantially to mortality and morbidity.
Despite daily smoking being the highest among male smokers in countries with a medium or high-income, there has been a steady increase in prevalence in low-income sub-Saharan African countries. This is figure is likely to get higher in other low-income countries because of income growth and increasing cigarette affordability, consequently pushing up incident of secondhand smoking.
Senior Policy Advisor at World Health Organisation (WHO) Professor Judith Mackay says that Africa has become a specific target for the industry at the moment.
“The industry is manipulating public opinion to gain appearance of respectability, fabricating support through front groups as well as exaggerating the economic importance of the industry,” says Mackay.
Mackay also highlighted that in countries like Italy, the tobacco industry supports women’s group including the Italian Chamber of Commerce’s women activities. This makes it hard for organizations to speak out against the adverse effects of smoking. – Health-e.
An edited version of this story was published by IOL.
Author
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Secondhand smoking kills more women than men
by Masutane, Health-e News
March 9, 2018