Sri Lanka has lowest occurrences of teen smoking: study

Sri Lanka has the lowest prevalence of teen smoking (1.7 percent) in the world, a recent study by the US Centers for Disease Colombo and Prevention (CDC), revealed. The highest prevalence (35 percent) was in Timor-Leste.
Sri Lanka has slapped over 40 percent tax on tobacco and alcoholic products and also has also mandated graphic health warnings on cigarette packs. Also advertising of tobacco or alcoholic products are not allowed and the government is currently mulling to impose a ban on loose cigarette sales. 
Ceylon Tobacco Company PLC, a unit of British American Tobacco, is the monopolistic cigarette operator in Sri Lanka while the country also has a thriving beedi industry, which is not regulated. 
According to the CDC report, roughly 11 percent of youth aged 13 to 15 around the world use tobacco products like cigarettes and cigars, a global survey of students suggests.
Tobacco use is the world’s leading cause of preventable death and serious illness, killing an estimated 6 million people each year, researchers note in the youth tobacco report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Most smokers take up the habit in their teens.
For the current study, researchers examined data from surveys of teens in 61 countries conducted from 2012 to 2015. Half of nations had a smoking rate of at least 15 percent for boys and at least 8 percent for girls, they found.
“Smoking has been shown to harm nearly every organ of the body, and science shows that most adult smokers first start smoking during adolescence,” said lead study author Rene Arrazola of the Office on Smoking and Health at the CDC. “Young people who begin to smoke at an earlier age are more likely than those who start at older ages to develop long-term nicotine addiction,” Arrazola said. “Therefore, efforts to prevent youth tobacco use are critical to prevent another generation of adults who smoke and suffer from smoking-related death and disease.”
For boys, the lowest smoking prevalence was 2.9 percent in Tajikistan and the highest was 61.4 percent in Timor-Leste. For girls, the lowest rate of 1.6 percent was seen in Tajikistan and the highest of 29 percent - in Bulgaria.

In the majority of countries, at least half of current tobacco smokers said they wanted to quit, the study also found. The proportion of student smokers who said they desired to quit ranged from a low of 32 percent in Uruguay to a high of 90 percent in the Philippines.
Limitations of the study include the reliance on teens to accurately recall and report on their smoking behaviour, the authors note. It also only included students enrolled in school, which might not fully represent smoking behaviour in 
these countries.