Monday, June 1, 2015
Bloomberg and CDC Foundation Explore Tobacco Use Covering 60 Percent of World's Population
Tobacco use represents the leading cause of death and disease in the world. Today, approximately 1.3 billion people use tobacco products and 6 million deaths each year can be attributed to tobacco use. Low- and middle-income countries bear much of the brunt of the tobacco use epidemic. To inform tobacco use research and policy formulation, the CDC Foundation along with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Lung Foundation today released The GATS Atlas(gatsatlas.org), which presents tobacco use statistics drawn from the Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS).
"The GATS Atlas illustrates the many dimensions of tobacco use and control interventions and is an invaluable resource," said Samira Asma, D.D.S., M.P.H., chief of the Global Noncommunicable Disease Unit in the Division of Global Health Protection, Center for Global Health at CDC. "The Atlas allows us to rigorously quantify the impact of these interventions and accelerate the implementation of the MPOWER measures to achieve the tobacco control and non-communicable disease targets...."