Every year, tobacco kills more than 8 million people. More than 7 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while around 1.2 million are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke (SHS), as per the WHO. Now one-of-its-kind study, conducted in the context of India, has found that the annual direct economic costs attributable to SHS amounted to Rs 567 billion. This accounts for 8 per cent of total annual health care expenditures on top of the staggering Rs 1773.4 billion in annual economic burden from tobacco use.
In fact, Rs 568 billion represents only one part of the total economic costs of SHS exposure, said the study as it painted a grim picture of the toll the SHS was taking on the individuals who were silently affected by the smoker’s habit. The study is published in the Journal of Nicotine and Tobacco Research.
All those people who do not smoke breathe in SHS and they take in nicotine and toxic chemicals the same way smokers do. The more the exposure, the higher the levels of these harmful chemicals in the body.
“The monetary burden does not include the additional indirect economic costs due to lost productivity, morbidity, and mortality caused by illness and early deaths arising from SHS exposure, that would further increase the final figure,” warned the team of authors led by Dr Rijo M john, an economist and researcher from the Rajagiri College of Social Sciences.
The study has quantified the tremendous economic burden of SHS exposure in India, using public data sources and a prevalence-based attributable risk approach to quantify the healthcare cost of continued exposure to SHS among non-smokers aged 15 and older.
The findings emphasize the need to strengthen smoke-free policies, especially in public places with researchers finding that the cost of SHS disproportionately affects India’s most vulnerable populations, including women, youth, and those with lower incomes. “Strengthening the Cigarette and Other Tobacco Products Act (COTPA) to remove all designated areas from public place and raising taxes on all tobacco products will motivate millions of Indians to quit and prevent youngsters from initiating tobacco use,” said Dr John while sharing the findings of the study at Twitter Spaces organized by the ‘Tobacco Free India’ organization recently.
“In fact, increasing tobacco taxes is one of the most effective ways to reduce smoking, yet India has not had any significant tax increase on any tobacco products for the past four years. The current tobacco tax collected in India from all tobacco products combined is less than the Rs 567 billion in health care costs caused by exposure to SHS,” Dr John lamented.
Estelle P. Dauchy, associate director from Campaign for Tobacco-free kids, who was also part of the study, said that with more than 100 million smokers in India, a vast number of non-smokers are exposed to SHS at home, at work, and in public places. There is no known safe level of exposure to SHS, a deadly mix of more than 7,000 chemicals that are known to cause premature death and disease in children and adults who do not smoke.
In fact, the costs were more than twice larger for females compared to males (29% and 71 % for males and females, respectively), he said.
Although smoking prevalence among adults dropped by 24% over the 6 years from 2009-10 to 20016-17, India still suffers the second-highest number of smokers in the world and its smoking prevalence remains large at 10.7%, putting a significant number of non-smokers including women and children at great risk of SHS.