Smoking is marketed as a masculine habit, linked to health, happiness, fitness, wealth, power, and virility. In reality, it leads to sickness, premature death, sexual impotence, and infertility.

Almost 1 billion men in the world smoke—about 35 percent of men in high-resource countries, and 50 percent of men in developing countries. Male smoking rates have now peaked, and trends in low-and middle-resource countries indicate slow but sure declines. However, this extremely slow trend is progressing over decades while, in the meantime, tobacco is killing about 
5 million men every year. In general, higher-educated men are abandoning tobacco addiction, leaving the smoking habit to poorer, less-educated men.

China deserves special mention because of the enormity of the tobacco problem and the danger it poses. Nearly 60 percent of Chinese men are smokers, and the country consumes more than 37 percent of the world’s cigarettes. China’s monumental addiction is, according to Philip Morris, “the most important feature on the landscape.” Escalating health and economic tolls imposed by tobacco threaten to impede the stable development of this major world power.

Fact: China’s 311 million male smokers exceed the entire population of the United States.

Monitor tobacco use and prevention policies
Protect people from tobacco smoke
Offer help to quit tobacco use
Warn about the dangers of tobacco
Enforce bans on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship
Raise taxes on tobacco

Building on the first-ever global public health treaty - the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) - the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2008 issued a comprehensive country-level report on the global tobacco epidemic. This report provides data from 179 countries covering 99% of the world’s population and sets baselines for implementation and enforcement of the six evidence-based and cost-effective policies of the WHO MPOWER strategy. Currently only 5% of the world’s population is fully protected by any one of the MPOWER interventions and no country implements and enforces all of them. By taking action to implement MPOWER, the leaders of governments and civil society can create the necessary environment to protect children from tobacco, help people quit tobacco use and save millions of lives a year.

The final version of the online Tobacco Atlas will have information on MPOWER steps related to the issues portrayed on each map.