Europeans are smoking less and their exposure to passive smoking has also decreased, according to a large study.

There are around 1.3 billion smokers in the world today and, experts claim, smoking will claim over 450 million lives in the next 50 years. However, things are beginning to change - especially in Europe. That's the conclusion of a big study carried out by researchers in Uppsala, Sweden.

They asked 9,000 participants in 12 European countries, Australia and the USA about their smoking habits in the early 1990s. Ten years later they went back and spoke to the group again. The number of active smokers had gone down by 15 per cent and 40 per cent fewer non-smokers were exposed to second-hand smoke. In other words, 33.9 per cent of the sample were smoking at the start of the study and 28.7 per cent at the end.

Results varied by center, but the decrease in active smoking was significant in 18 out of 29 and the only location to actually show an increase was Tartu, Estonia where smoking had gone up from 30.7 per cent to 43.9 per cent. This anomaly might be explained by the stress of the collapse of the Soviet Union and aggressive marketing by the tobacco industry in Eastern Europe. Elsewhere, there has been the introduction of new legislation banning smoking in public places or in the workplace ,which has no doubt contributed to the fall in the number of smokers and exposure to second-hand smoke.

Source
European Respiratory Journal March 2006