WHO : Five points to know about cigarettes on World No Tobacco Day

Paris: Every minute 15 people die from tobacco and ten million smokers light a cigarette.

Here are five main points that you should know on World No Tobacco Day, which is celebrated by the World Health Organization on Wednesday.

How many smokers?

The World Health Organization and The Tobacco Atlas estimate that the number of smokers exceeds one billion in the world, with about eight billion people living. 

Every year, smokers smoke more than 5,000 billion cigarettes, according to the Tobacco Atlas, a tobacco information center at parent organization Vital Strategies and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The proportion of smokers has been declining at the global level for years, thanks to the measures imposed by countries to combat smoking, such as tax increases, as well as the emergence of electronic cigarettes in recent years.

In the year 2000, a third of the world's population over the age of 15 smoked. Today, this percentage has decreased to about 20%.

Where are the largest number of smokers concentrated?

China (1.4 billion people) has the largest number of smokers in the world (about 300 million smokers), according to WHO figures for 2020.

Indonesia is the country with the highest proportion of male smokers, as 62.7% of smokers over the age of 15 are male.

The cigarette has become a scourge affecting mainly poor countries: 80% of smokers live in low- or middle-income countries.

In Africa and the Middle East, the smoking habit has decreased slightly, but it is increasing in some countries such as Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq.

How many smoking victims?

Tobacco is the leading preventable cause of death: one person dies every four seconds in the world from cigarettes.

Active or passive smoking caused the death of about nine million people in 2019, according to a study published by The Lancet in 2021.

Diseases directly related to tobacco are cancer - especially lung cancer - myocardial infarction, cardiovascular disease and respiratory disorders such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

In the twentieth century, tobacco caused the death of 100 million people, according to a study published by the journal “Nature” in 2009, more than the number of victims of World War II (between 60 and 80 million people) in addition to the 18 million deaths in the First World War.

Mass smoking could cause 450 million deaths in the first half of the 21st century and is costly to society, absorbing 6% of global health spending, according to a study coordinated by the World Health Organization and published in Tobacco Control in 2018.

What is the effect of smoking on the planet?

Cigarettes not only damage the lungs and arteries of smokers, but also the planet. Tobacco production and consumption emit about 84 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, equivalent to a fifth of the pollution sourced by commercial aircraft, according to World Health Organization figures.

Approximately one million tons of cigarette butts are discarded annually and contain non-biodegradable cellulose acetate. Tobacco cultivation requires 22 billion tons of water per year and its industry produces 25 million tons of solid waste.

Sector decline?

Is the cigarette manufacturing sector in decline with the gradual decline in tobacco consumption since 2012?

Nothing is certain, according to the Tobacco Atlas. In wealthy countries, this powerful industry has expanded into alternative products, primarily electronic cigarettes. In low- and middle-income countries, the big tobacco companies continue their “aggressive” pricing policy and spend huge sums of money to fight tobacco control measures.

Two American economic analysis offices expect that the next five to eight years will witness an annual increase of about 2.5% in the total trading volume of the sector, which will reach $940 billion in 2023.

On the occasion of World No Tobacco Day, the World Health Organization called on farmers to grow edible foodstuffs instead of tobacco plants, with the aim of enhancing food security. But she also noted that areas devoted to this type of crop in Africa had increased by about 20% in 15 years.

Chinese health : Corona virus leakage from a laboratory should not be ruled out

 LONDON: A former Chinese government scientist has said the possibility of coronavirus leaking from a laboratory should not be ruled out.

The view of virologist and immunologist George Zhao is completely contradictory to the opinion of the Chinese government, which ruled out that a laboratory in Wuhan was the source of the virus.

British media reported that Gao, the former director of the Center for Disease Control in China, told the BBC Radio 4 podcast: “Anything can always be suspected. This is science. Nothing is excluded.”

Zhao is currently deputy head of the National Natural Science Foundation of China after retiring from the CDC in China last year, where he played a key role in the pandemic response and efforts to track where the virus came from.

The Chinese embassy in Britain told the BBC, "The so-called 'laboratory leak' is just a lie launched by anti-Chinese forces. This lie is politically motivated and has no scientific basis.”

Digital health : An artificial intelligence system that can distinguish between five subtypes of heart attacks

SAN FRANCISCO: A team of researchers in Britain has created an artificial intelligence system that can distinguish between five different subtypes of heart attacks, speeding up diagnosis and saving patients' lives.

It is known that heart attacks are a general term for expressing the inability of the heart to pump blood around the body normally, but the methods currently used in diagnosing the disease do not help accurately predict how this health condition will develop from one patient to another.

A research team from Imperial College London analyzed the data of more than 300,000 heart patients aged 30 years or over in Britain over a period of 30 years. Thanks to artificial intelligence techniques, they were able to identify five subtypes of heart attacks.

In the framework of the study published in the scientific journal The Lancet Digital Health, the research team was able to create an electronic application that allows doctors to diagnose the subtype of heart attack that a patient suffers from, which improves the chances of saving patients' lives.

And the website “Medical Express”, which specializes in medical research, quoted researcher Amitava Banerjee from the Institute of Health Informatics at Imperial College London as saying: “We aim to improve ways of classifying heart diseases, in order to better understand the path of disease development and transfer this information to patients.”

"Better differentiating between types of heart attacks may lead to the development of targeted therapies for each disease, and may allow us to think differently about new treatment plans," he said.

Turkish kocaeli state health directorate , 8 medical tips for a healthy summer that keeps you away from common diseases

Istanbul: Summer comes in most Arab countries during these days, which raises temperatures, loosens clothes, and changes habits in eating, drinking and sleeping.

Doctor Ibrahim Topal Ali, from the Turkish Kocaeli State Health Directorate, offers a set of medical tips to live a healthy summer away from mistakes that may lead to disease.

And he says, "As we enter the summer season, there are caveats about some things that if we avoid them, we can spend the summer season with the least amount of diseases and health disorders."

The following are the tips given by Topal Ali:

1- Avoid standing for long hours directly under the sun, as this leads to “heatstroke” injury, as the high body temperature causes a significant negative impact on the nervous system and a decrease in blood pressure.

All of this causes a fainting state, so it is necessary to use sunscreen to protect the skin from ultraviolet radiation, and to use a cap or hat for the head to reduce the heat.

2- Do not take a shower with cold water immediately after a hot day, because this negatively affects the blood vessels and replace it with lukewarm water to avoid any thermal shock to the body.

3- Wearing dark clothes leads to the absorption of air heat and thus a greater rise in body temperature. This is why it is important to wear light and cotton colors to help absorb sweat, reflect sunlight and thus reduce heat.

4- Focusing on drinking sufficient amounts of water to compensate for the body’s losses from it, which is excreted through sweating, and staying away as much as possible from cold soft drinks, because they are saturated with harmful sugars.

5- Avoid sitting in front of fans or air conditioners when the clothes are wet, whether with sweat or water, because this will lead to spasm of the shoulder and back muscles and the occurrence of various internal diseases.

6- Reducing the intake of ice cream saturated with fats and sugars, and replacing it with ice cream that can be made at home from natural healthy fruits.

7- An increase in the hours of staying up late leads to a disturbance in appetite and nutrition, so it is necessary to regulate the number of meals to suit our daily needs, and to avoid double night meals.

8- Doing healthy exercise in the morning, before noon, and after sunset, to avoid exposure to the scorching sun.