By Ivyn Kipruto
Strong global tobacco control efforts are yielding significant success, preventing millions from starting tobacco use, yet the industry is aggressively fighting back by promoting new nicotine products, particularly targeting young people, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
While smoking rates are generally falling, the WHO warns that tobacco addiction remains a major global health crisis.
The WHO Global Report on Trends in Prevalence of Tobacco use 2000 to 2024 reveals a 27 percent decline in tobacco use since 2010, translating to a reduction of approximately 120 million users.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, credited these gains to strong control efforts by countries, but immediately cautioned that the industry’s counter-movement demands faster and stronger government action. Although the total number of tobacco users worldwide has dropped from 1.38 billion in 2000 to 1.2 billion in 2024, a worrying one in five adults remains addicted, fueling millions of preventable deaths each year.
A major new concern highlighted by the report is the rise of e-cigarettes. For the first time, WHO estimated global e-cigarette use, finding that over 100 million people now vape, including 86 million adults and 15 million adolescents aged 13 to 15 years.
In countries with available data, children are nine times more likely to vape than adults, leading Dr. Etienne Krug, WHO Director of Health Determinants, Promotion and Prevention, to state that e-cigarettes are “fueling a new wave of nicotine addiction” and are, in reality, hooking kids earlier despite being marketed as harm reduction tools.
Analysis of gender trends shows that women are quitting faster than men. Global tobacco use among women fell from 11 percent in 2010 to 6.6 percent in 2024, with the number of female users dropping from 277 million to 206 million. This enabled women to hit the 30 percent global reduction target five years early, in 2020.
However, men still constitute the largest group of users, accounting for more than four out of five tobacco users worldwide, with nearly one billion men still smoking or using tobacco products. While male prevalence declined from 41.4 percent in 2010 to 32.5 percent in 2024, WHO projects men will not meet the 30 percent reduction target until 2031.
Regionally, South-East Asia recorded the most dramatic improvement, with male tobacco use nearly halving since 2000, accounting for more than half of the global decline. Africa remains the region with the lowest overall prevalence at 9.5 percent, though population growth has caused the total number of users to increase. Europe now reports the highest overall prevalence at 24.1 percent, and worryingly, European women record the world’s highest female smoking rate at 17.4 percent. The Western Pacific region has seen slower progress, registering the world’s highest male prevalence at 43.3 percent.
In response to the industry’s tactics and the continuing high rates of addiction, WHO is urging governments to step up tobacco control measures. This includes fully implementing the MPOWER package and the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
Specifically, the agency is calling on countries to urgently regulate emerging nicotine products, raise tobacco taxes, ban advertising, and expand cessation services.
Dr. Jeremy Farrar, WHO Assistant Director-General, concluded that with nearly 20 percent of adults still using tobacco and nicotine products, the world cannot let up now, emphasizing that “stronger, faster action is the only way to beat the tobacco epidemic.”
