"With Swedish tobacco habits, 200,000 lives would be saved each year within the EU."
A study that has attracted much attention, The Burden of Mortality from Smoking: Comparing Sweden with other countries in the European Union, by Professor Brad Rodu and Professor Emeritus Philip Cole of the University of Alabama, Birmingham, USA, was published in the European Journal of Epidemiology in February 2004 (volume 19, pages 129-131).
In the study, the authors state that there are approximately 50 million male smokers of 25 years of age or older in the member states of the European Union (prior to the enlargement of the Union) and that almost 500,000 die annually of tobacco-related diseases, that is, various types of cancer, heart diseases and cardiovascular diseases. According to Rodu and Cole, Swedish men consume approximately the same amount of tobacco as men in other EU member states, but the proportion of smokers is extremely low because so many of the Swedes choose to use tobacco in the form of snus. In the study, the authors calculate statistically that nearly 200,000 lives could be spared each year if all men in the EU adopted Swedish tobacco habits.
|
Number of tobacco-related deaths
(men aged 25 or older) |
Number of lives saved
(men aged 25 or older) |
| Belgium |
16,227 |
8,213 |
| Denmark |
8,236 |
4,195 |
| Finland |
5,293 |
1,570 |
| France |
63,153 |
19,240 |
| Greece |
22,131 |
13,281 |
| Ireland |
4,462 |
2,169 |
| Italy |
76,234 |
28,437 |
| Luxembourg |
475 |
171 |
| Netherlands |
17,345 |
6,199 |
| Portugal |
11,082 |
3,878 |
| Spain |
53,681 |
22,509 |
| UK |
76,771 |
32,032 |
| Sweden |
7,396 |
------- |
| Germany |
112,274 |
48,912 |
| Austria |
10,897 |
5,058 |
| All countries |
485,657 |
195,864 |