WHO estimates passive smoking causes 600,000 deaths every year. Quit smoking, and your risk of a heart attack drops almost immediately, returning to that of a never-smoker within five to 15 years.Ĭigarettes contain over 4,000 toxic chemicals, 50 of which are known to cause cancer and nicotine is one of them. Smokers suffer heart attacks at twice the rate of nonsmokers-and they’re less likely to survive them.įortunately, these effects are reversible. Cigarettes cause 124,000 lung-cancer deaths each year, but do you know they kill even more people (138,000) via heart disease. Lung cancer is a good guess, and a wrong answer. What’s the greatest threat to a smoker’s health? Plain packaging is an important demand that reduces the attractiveness of tobacco products, restricts use of tobacco packaging as a form of tobacco advertising and promotion, limits misleading packaging and labelling, and increases the effectiveness of health warnings. For this year’s World No Tobacco Day, WHO are calling on countries to get ready for plain (standardized) packaging of tobacco products.
