Study: More than 600,000 people killed yearly by secondhand smoke

About 1% of all the world's deaths annually blamed on others' smoking, researchers estimate.

Secondhand smoke kills more than 600,000 people worldwide every year, according to a new study.

In the first look at the global effect of secondhand smoking, researchers analyzed data from 2004 for 192 countries. They found 40 percent of children and more than 30 percent of nonsmoking men and women regularly breathe in secondhand smoke.

Scientists then estimated that passive smoking causes about 379,000 deaths from heart disease, 165,000 deaths from lower respiratory disease, 36,900 deaths from asthma and 21,400 deaths from lung cancer a year. Altogether, those account for about 1 percent of the world's deaths, according to the study published today in the British medical journal Lancet.

"This helps us understand the real toll of tobacco," said Armando Peruga, a program manager at the World Health Organization's Tobacco-Free Initiative, who led the study. He said 603,000 deaths from secondhand smoking should be added to the 5.1 million deaths that smoking itself causes every year.

Peruga and colleagues found the highest numbers of people exposed to secondhand smoke are in Europe and Asia. The lowest rates of exposure were in the Americas, the eastern Mediterranean and Africa.

source: http://www.statesman.com