GlobalHealthCuratedhigh confidence

Tobacco Use

The largest preventable cause of death on earth.

Severity score

66.8

Critical · default weighting

Trajectory

Improving

What this is

Tobacco kills around eight million people a year, including over a million non-smokers exposed to second-hand smoke. Consumption is falling in high income countries and rising in parts of Africa and Southeast Asia as the industry redirects marketing. Taxation and advertising bans work where governments apply them.

Score breakdown

Loss of life

Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.

Lives negatively impacted

People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.

Financial cost

Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.

Environmental impact

Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.

Trajectory

Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.