Smoking causes half the tuberculosis deaths in ...( smoking kills people is by damaging the...),Health

smoking kills people is by damaging the lung's defences against chronic TB infection. Our study indicates that in rural India about 12% of smokers (but only 3% of non-smokers) will die prematurely from TB. In urban India the corresponding risks are 8% and 2%."

Another co-author, Prabhat Jha, of the University of Toronto, Canada comments: "Tuberculosis still causes about 1.6 million deaths a year worldwide, including more than a million in Asia, 400,000 in Africa, and 100,000 in the Americas and Europe. Not only in Asia and Africa, but also throughout America and Europe, smoking will increase the number of people who develop clinical TB themselves and can then infect others, unless they are properly treated and cured." (All quotes by e-mail, they do not appear in the published paper).

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Contact: Joe Santangelo
j.santangelo@elsevier.com
212-633-3810
Lancet
14-Aug-2003

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