NEW DELHI, INDIA, February 24, 2008: Lounging in a smoke-filled cafe, Purvi Ahuja, 20, and her hip friends like their text messages to be fast, their cappuccinos to be milky and their cigarettes to be plentiful. “I know it’s so bad. My skin is even gross, my lips are black because of it,” sighed Ahuja, her ashtray filled with cigarette butts. Her friends agreed that it’s just not easy to stop smoking.
Young Indians, especially young women like Ahuja, represent one of the cigarette companies’ largest markets. Because they are so heavily targeted, they are also at particular risk of smoking-related death, according to health officials. There are 120 million smokers in India, half of them younger than 30.
The research was conducted across the country by a team of 900 field workers from India, Canada and Britain and the results published online in the New England Journal of Medicine last week. The study found that more than half of smoking-related deaths would be among poor and illiterate Indians. Forty percent of tuberculosis cases in India are due to smoking.
“The health risks are much bigger than previously thought,” said Prabhat Jha, director of the Center for Global Health Research at the University of Toronto in Canada and one of the report’s authors.