Passive smoking kills 6 lakh people every year

London: Passive smoking kills over 600,000 people, including more than 165,000 children under five, every year in the world, according to a new study.

The study, published in the medical journal The Lancet, is the first to estimate worldwide impact of passive smoking. It found more than half of the deaths are from heart disease, followed by deaths from cancer, lung infections, asthma and other ailments.

Researchers who analysed data collected from 192 countries in 2004 estimated that passive smoking caused 600,000 deaths,which was about one per cent of worldwide mortality.

The exposure to secondhand smoke triggered 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 during that year, it said.

The study led by Dr Annette Pruss-Ustun of the World Health Organisation's 's Tobacco-Free Initiative in Geneva and her colleagues also found 47 per cent of deaths from secondhand smoke occurred in women, 28 per cent in children, and 26 per cent in men.

Besides, it was found that 40 per cent of children and more than 33 per cent of male and female non-smokers regularly breathe in second-hand smoke.

More than two-thirds of the children's deaths are in Africa and Asia, where they have less access to important public health services, such as vaccines, and less advanced medical care, the researchers concluded.

"Children's exposure to second-hand smoke most likely happens at home," the study authors wrote.

"The combination of infectious diseases and tobacco seems to be a deadly combination for children in (Africa and south Asia)... and might hamper the efforts to reduce the mortality rate for those aged younger than five years."

Tobacco kills a total of 5.7 million people worldwide each year, including 5.1 million people who die from their own smoking, the report said.

According to World Health Organisation, smoking is the world's leading cause of preventable death.In an accompanying editorial to the report , Heather Wipfli and Jonathan Samet of the University of Southern California said: "There can be no question that the 1 billion smokers in the world are exposing billions of non-smokers to second-hand smoke, a disease-causing indoor air pollutant."