WHO:全球每年60萬人死於二手菸
Around one in a hundred deaths worldwide is due to passive smoking, which kills an estimated 600,000 people a year, World Health Organization (WHO) researchers said on Friday.
In the first study to assess the global impact of second-hand smoke, WHO experts found that children are more heavily exposed to second-hand smoke than any other age-group, and around 165,000 of them a year die because of it.
"Two-thirds of these deaths occur in Africa and South Asia," the researchers, led by Annette Pruss-Ustun of the WHO in Geneva, wrote in their study.
Children's exposure to second-hand smoke is most likely to happen at home, and the double blow of infectious diseases and tobacco "seems to be a deadly combination for children in these regions", they said.
Commenting on the findings in the Lancet journal, Heather Wipfli and Jonathan Samet from the University of Southern California said policymakers try to motivate families to stop smoking in the home.
"In some countries, smoke-free homes are becoming the norm, but far from universally," they wrote.
The WHO researchers looked at data from 192 countries for their study. To get comprehensive data from all 192, they had to go back to 2004. They used mathematical modeling to estimate deaths.
Worldwide, 40 percent of children, 33 percent of non-smoking men and 35 percent non-smoking women were exposed to second-hand smoke in 2004, they found.
This exposure was estimated to have caused 379,000 deaths from heart disease, 165,000 from lower respiratory infections, 36,900 from asthma and 21,400 from lung cancer.
For the full impact of smoking, these deaths should be added to the estimated 5.1 million deaths a year attributable to active tobacco use, the researchers said.
While deaths due to passive smoking in children were skewed toward poor and middle-income countries, deaths in adults were spread across countries at all income levels.
In Europe's high-income countries, only 71 child deaths occurred, while 35,388 deaths were in adults. Yet in the countries assessed in Africa, an estimated 43,375 deaths due to passive smoking were in children compared with 9,514 in adults.
世界衛生組織的研究人員週五稱，全球每100例死亡中就有1例是死於被動吸菸，每年全球約有60萬人死於二手菸。
這一研究首次對二手菸的全球影響進行了評估。世界衛生組織的專家發現，兒童比其他年齡段的人更多的暴露於二手煙環境中，每年約有16.5萬兒童因此喪命。
研究人員在報告中寫道：“因吸入二手菸而導致的死亡有三分之二發生在非洲和南亞。”總部位於日內瓦的世界衛生組織的安妮特•普魯絲-烏斯頓是這一研究的領頭人。
他們稱，兒童在家中暴露於二手煙的情況最多，傳染病和菸草的雙重侵害“對於這些地區的兒童似乎是一個致命的組合”。
來自南加州大學的希瑟•威普弗利和喬納森•沙美對發表在《柳葉刀》雜誌上的這一研究報告做了評論。他們說，決策者試圖對家庭實施激勵手段，阻止在家中吸菸的行爲。
他們寫道：“在一些國家，無煙家庭越來越常見，但離普及還相差得很遠。”
爲了進行這一研究，世界衛生組織的研究人員查看了來自192個國家的資料。他們還查看了2004年的資料，以得到192個國家的全面信息，並用數學模式來估算死亡人數。
他們發現，在2004年，世界範圍內有40%的兒童、33%的不吸菸男性和35%的不吸菸女性暴露於二手煙環境下。
經過估算，這種二手菸環境已導致37.9萬人死於心臟病，16.5萬人死於下呼吸道感染，3.69萬人死於哮喘病，2.14萬人死於肺癌。
研究人員說，爲了全面反映吸菸造成的影響，這些死亡人數也應該加入每年死於主動吸菸的約510萬人。
儘管被動吸菸造成的兒童死亡多發生於中低收入的國家，吸二手菸而導致的成人死亡在各個收入水平的國家中卻普遍存在。
在歐洲的高收入國家中，只發生了71例因被動吸菸而導致的兒童死亡，而二手菸導致的成人死亡卻有3.5萬例。但是在接受評估的非洲國家中，被動吸菸導致的死亡人口約有4.3萬爲兒童，9514人爲成人。
Vocabulary:
skewed toward: 偏向於
