Largest-ever tobacco study finds 'urgent need' for policy change

About half the men in numerous developing nations use tobacco, and women in those regions are taking up smoking at an earlier age than they used to, according to what is being called the largest-ever international study on tobacco use. The study, which covered enough representative samples to estimate tobacco use among 3 billion people, "demonstrates an urgent need for policy change in low- and middle-income countries," said lead researcher Gary Giovino, whose report was published in the British medical journal The Lancet.

The figures bolster statements by the World Health Organization that while much of the industrialized world, including the United States, has seen a substantial reduction in smoking in recent years, the opposite trend is under way in parts of the developing world. Ruling shows 'big tobacco can be taken on and beaten,' Australia says. The WHO warns that "if current trends continue, it will cause up to one billion deaths in the 21st century."

The new study, the Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS), focused on countries in which smoking is known to be a growing problem. "The burden of tobacco use is moving," says Giovino, who formerly oversaw the Office on Smoking and Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "The tobacco epidemic takes different forms in different countries," he said in an interview with CNN, pointing out that chewing tobacco and other smokeless forms are part of the problem. "But manufactured cigarettes are dominating." Giovino now runs the University at Buffalo's Department of Community Health and Health Behavior in Buffalo, New York.

The study, conducted between 2008 and 2010, found that across 14 developing nations, 49% of men and 11% of women used tobacco. Most of them smoked -- 41% of men and 5% of women. Numbers were highest in Russia, where 60% of men and 22% of women used tobacco; China, where 53% of men and 2% of women were tobacco users; Ukraine, where 50% of men and 11% of women used tobacco, and Turkey, where 48% of men and 15% of women used tobacco.

In some countries, smoking rates may now be even higher than they were in 2010, WHO officials say. "One place where we know it's gone up, unfortunately, is Egypt -- as a result of the revolution," said Edouard Tursan D'Espaignet of WHO''s tobacco control program. The GATS study found 38% of men and less than 1% of women smoked in Egypt as of 2010.