Women and young people in developing countries are smoking in increasingly alarming numbers.

According to a study in the Lancet Journal, after years of anti-smoking measures have been encouraged across the world, there exists an alarming rate of tobacco use in developing countries.

Tobacco is likely to kill half of its users as there are low quit rates.

Women and young people are among the most addicted.

“Although 1.1 billion people have been covered by the adoption of the most effective tobacco-control policies since 2008, 83 percent of the world’s population are not covered by two or more of these policies,” Gary Giovino of the University at Buffalo School of Public Health and Health Professions in New York, who led the research, told Reuters.
Such measures include legislation in some developed nations banning smoking in public places, imposing advertising bans and requiring more graphic health warnings on cigarette packets.

As Western lifestyle habits extend into developing countries, so too, do the diseases which come with them.

In a paper from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France the findings indicate that along with a rise in living standards, cancer will be on the rise.

A 75 percent increase in cancer by 2030 is expected in the developing world.

The researchers said that rising living standards in less developed countries would probably lead to a decrease in the number of infection-related cancers. But it was also likely there would also be an increase in types of the disease usually seen in richer countries.
They predicted that middle-income countries such as China, India and Africa could see an increase of 78 percent in the number of cancer cases by 2030.
Cases in less developed regions were expected to see a 93 percent rise over the same period, said the paper published in the journal Lancet Oncology.
Those rises would more than offset signs of a decline in cervical, stomach and other kinds of cancer in wealthier nations, said the researchers.

The most common types of cancer in the world are lung cancer, female breast cancer, colorectal cancer, stomach cancer, prostate cancer, liver cancer and cervical cancer.