Nations lose over 6.5 pc of GNI to smoking

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New York, December 6:: Love for nicotine is weighing heavily on developing nations with top ten smoker countries losing more than USD 30 billion annually which is more than 6.5 per cent of their gross national income (GNI).

The top ten smokers countries, identified by Forbes magazine include Kenya, Turkey, Namibia, Yemen, Guinea, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, Mongolia, Nauru and Sao Tome and Principe.

Thanks to celebrity activism and widespread media attention, the magazine notes, HIV, malaria and starvation are well-known diseases of the third world. But there's another resource-draining plague afflicting these countries - smoking.

While the smoking population is half what it was a generation ago in the US and other industrialised nations, with only one in five using tobacco, it's different in Africa and East Asia, where time stands still when it comes to cigarettes, it says.

Smoking rates of 40 per cent or more of the population are common in these regions and medical services are limited.

In Turkey, for example, 44 per cent of its 71.5 million population smokes, draining USD 22.4 billion annually which accounts for 5.8 per cent of its GNI of 384.3 billion dollars.

Around 45 per cent of Yemen's population smokes costing USD one billion to its economy annually and accounts for 6.2 per cent of GNI.

Societal costs in those countries, Forbes says, can't be calculated the same way they would be in the US, where most studies measure how much smokers burden taxpayers with extra Medicare and Medicaid payments.

For poor countries, there is no Medicare-like programme to fund nor is there enough data about the economic impact of other diseases to make real comparisons.

Tom Glynn, Director of International Care Control for the American Cancer Society has been quoted as saying. "In Africa, these health care systems don't exist, at least not in the form we're used to," Only Kenya, he says of Africa's low-income nations, has a medical care system that reasonably resembles that of the western world.

Most studies conclude a cigarette costs 10 minutes of life, so a pack-a-day smoker (20 cigarettes a day) loses 13.9 per cent of a year to the habit over the long haul, the magazine notes.

In Namibia, where half of the country's two million citizens smoke, the average income is about USD 3,230 a year, according to the World Bank.