Smoking Stats

Smoking is one of the major death causes in the world because of the health complications associated with it. According to WHO-World Health Organization- one person dies every 8 seconds due to smoking; of which it is basically translated to 5 million annually.
Globally, there are 1.1 Billion smokers and it has been predicted that it will rise to 1.6 Billion by the year 2025; this is if the current trend continues. An average smoker smokes about 20-30 cigarettes in a day. China is home to 300 million smokers who smoke approximately 1.7 trillion sticks of cigarettes in a year, or rather, in a minute the Chinese smoke 3 million cigarettes.
Worldwide, it has been approximated that 10 million cigarettes are purchased a minute, that basically translates to 15 billion being sold each day. More than 5 trillion cigarettes are produced and used annually. If 5 trillion cigarette filters are weighed, they approximately weigh 2 billion pounds.
Cigarette filters look like cotton but essentially they are made of thin fibers of plastic that are known as cellulose acetate, this material makes the filters to take up to 18 months to 10 years to decompose. It is estimated that trillions of filters that are filled with toxic chemicals are discarded as waste and thus they are harmful to the environment.
A cigarette approximately contains 8 to 9 milligrams of nicotine; in a cigar the nicotine content is 100 to 200 milligrams, but others have as high as 400 milligrams.
Four or five cigarettes have enough nicotine that can kill an average adult if it is ingested whole. However smokers take in about one or two milligrams of nicotine per cigarette, the remainder is burned off.
Cigarette smoke exposes one to benzene which is a known cause of acute myeloid leukemia, in U.S. smokers, 90 percent of benzene exposures are as a result of cigarettes. Radioactive elements lead and polonium are present in cigarette smoke in low levels. During World War 2 Hydrogen cyanide was used as a weapon of mass destruction, this element is present in the cigarette smoke.
Smoking 2 to 4 cigarettes in a row increases the blood fats by up to 400%, this therefore means that smokers have a higher chance of having heart diseases at the age of 35 to 45 years, the life expectancy of a smoker is lessened by 8.3 years or 12 to 14 minutes per cigarette smoked. Further, smokers will miss 7 to 8 work days a year.
In the U.S, an alarming statistics of 3000 teenagers take up smoking on a daily basis, on the broader perspective teenagers worldwide that pick up smoking daily are 80,000 to 100,000. One in five teenagers aged 13 to 15 smoke cigarettes.
About 80% and 90% of lung cancer in women and men respectively is caused by cigarette smoking. A child borne of a smoking mother will have a heart beat rate that is faster by 30% to that of a non smoking mother.
Road accidents are most likely to occur when a smoker is driving due to slow reflexes and lack of alertness. If anti-smoking campaigns are not done worldwide, it is predicted that 1 billion people will die this century due to smoking related complications.