Daily tobacco use now 'lowest among industrialised nations'Australia now has the lowest smoking rates of all the industrialised nations that comprise the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), according to a report released today by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
The report, Statistics on Drug Use in Australia 2004, shows that the proportion of the population aged 14 and over who smoked daily fell from 19.5% to 17.4% between 2001 and 2004.
At the other end of the tobacco smoking scale among OECD nations were the Netherlands, Hungary, Korea and Japan, all with rates of over 30%. Australian rates were also considerably lower than those for the UK (27%) and New Zealand (25%).
AIHW report author Priscilla Dowling said that being lowest-ranked among OECD countries meant that Australia 'probably had the lowest rates in the world, although one can never be absolutely certain, because many countries outside the OECD do not collect accurate data of this kind'.
29 July 2005
Red Earth, Pink Lungs
I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.
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3 comments:
Well, congratulations Australia! Seriously, that is an impressive statistic.
I thought of you when I saw it; I don't know if you recall, but you said something to me once along the lines of smoking being banned everywhere outside of Australia. Once I left the country I found that to be laughably incorrect. Surprisingly so. Intercity trains in the UK had a smoking car, if you can believe it! Indoor kids' playgrounds in Denmark had ashtrays every couple of feet! In Japan it was impossible -- and I mean that quite literally -- to have a meal without having to peer through the haze.
Nicotine is for babies! we take our ingestion of substances seriously!... what do we need with legal chemicals!
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