Tobacco — fact sheet
Cited in 2 Likelier entries (2 risks, 0 decisions).
Used in 2 entries
For each citing entry, the verbatim excerpt and Likelier's calculation notes (how the source's number was converted to the lifetime-probability framing) are shown below. Click through to read the full claim ledger.
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Tobacco kills more than 7 million people per year, including 1.6 million non-smokers from secondhand smoke; kills up to half of its users who don't quit
“"Tobacco kills more than 7 million people each year, including an estimated 1.6 million non-smokers who are exposed to second-hand smoke. [...] Tobacco kills up to half of its users who don’t quit."”
Calculation notes
The WHO "up to half of its users who don’t quit" formulation is the single most widely cited institutional statement of the headline figure. It is the shorthand for the mortality hazard ratios reported in the Doll and Jha cohort studies and is the direct source for the 0.5 point estimate. Paired with the 7 million-deaths-per-year aggregate: across roughly 1.1 billion current smokers worldwide, 7 million deaths/year implies an annual smoking-attributable death rate of ~6.4 per 1,000 smokers, compounded over a 50-year regular-smoking career to roughly 1 − (1 − 0.0064)^50 ≈ 0.28 as a floor, which rises to ~0.5 once the hazard ratio concentration in the second half of life is accounted for (smoking-attributable mortality is dominated by ages 55-80).
Independence note: WHO draws on IHME Global Burden of Disease estimates for the 7-million headline and on the Doll / Jha cohort studies (cited separately below) for the "up to half" formulation. Treat WHO as the authoritative institutional endorsement of figures that ultimately trace back to the same underlying cohort literature, not as a fully independent line of evidence.
Source date: 2025-07-31 · Accessed: 2026-04-11
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SHS kills ~1.6 million non-smokers globally per year; no safe level of SHS exposure exists
“"Tobacco kills more than 7 million people each year, including an estimated 1.6 million non-smokers who are exposed to second-hand smoke."”
Calculation notes
The WHO 1.6 million non-smoker SHS deaths globally provides the international anchor and cross-check. Scaling naively to the US by population share (~4.2M of 57M global deaths) would imply ~118,000 US SHS deaths, higher than the CDC's 41,000. The gap primarily reflects: (a) the WHO/IHME figure includes lower-income regions where indoor solid-fuel cooking fire co-exposure substantially inflates the SHS burden; (b) CDC's SAMMEC model uses a more conservative attributable-fraction method. The US CDC figure is used for the normalized headline as more relevant to a US adult in a post-ban environment.
Independence note: WHO draws on IHME Global Burden of Disease estimates using a different exposure-prevalence and relative-risk framework than CDC SAMMEC. The two-to-three-fold difference in implied US figures is a genuine methodological disagreement, not a simple error; it is reflected in the wide uncertainty band.
Source date: 2025-07-31 · Accessed: 2026-04-11
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