As per a recent study backed by World Health Organisation (WHO), it has been revealed that Andhra Pradesh has the highest number of smokers in South India.
While 19% of men constitute the smokers, 2% of women and 10.7% (99.5 million) of all adults currently smoke tobacco, according to the Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS) conducted by conducted by Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) along with Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.
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Coming to Andhra Pradesh, 14.2% of the people smoke as compared to the national average of 10.7%. It has also been revealed that 7.1% in Andhra use smokeless tobacco which was way lesser than the national average of 21.4%.
Andhra Pradesh stood out as the South Indian state with the highest number of smokers as compared to the 8.3%, 8.8%, 9.3%, and 10.5% of Telangana, Karnataka, Kerela and Tamil Nadu respectively. It is also to be noticed that except AP, all the other Southern states recorded numbers lesser than the national average.
Mizoram recorded, with 34.4% smokers, the highest percentage of smokers in the country.
While 92.4% of adults considered that smoking causes severe illnesses, 95.6% of adults believed the same for smokeless tobacco.
The study revealed that on an average, the monthly expenditure of a smoker on cigarettes was Rs 1192.5.
The GATS stated that the awareness campaigns used to ask people to quit using tobacco, worked well.
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