Smoking Prevalence in Saudi Arabia

Thesis statement

There is high prevalence of smoking in Saudi Arabia

Introduction

Smoking has now become a part of fashion especially among the young generation. People are aware of various bad impacts of smoking on the health but despite of that people keep on smoking. Smokers have been become addicted to it and smoking has become the status symbol of society. Most of the youngsters start smoking because they feel that it would make them accepted as modern and open minded in the society.

Tobacco cigarette companies are having their great business all over the world because of the rise of smokers every year. However, the governments keep on rising the tobacco prices to discourage people but people have become serious addictive of smoking and they use up a particular amount from their earnings on smoking.

Cigarette contains nicotine and it is has high addictive effects. It is generally known that only about six cigarettes can activate nicotine receptors in brain that makes the craving in person to take nicotine. Few cigarettes can change the person's brain for whole life while moving the person toward death quickly.

Tobacco smoke holds thousands types of harmful chemicals that spoil different functioning systems in the human body by damaging thousands of cells in the body and by creating many genetic changes. Various diseases are caused from smoking such as cancer, TB. Smoking is considered the cause of more than 25 life taking diseases.

According to the World Health Organization, smoking takes about five million deaths each year around the world. WHO estimates that in 2020 the death rate will arrive to 10 million of which about 17 percent will be in developed countries. The smoking is the curable disease that the worldwide health care societies are facing, though this disease is curable but the people don't want to quit smoking.

Discussion

In Saudi Arabia, the smoking habits in young people are on alarming stage. Many research studies have been conducted on the smoking habits in Saudi Arabia and the facts and studies shows that the young people who start smoking are mostly in early the teen ages and they are more likely to die early deaths than other who start smoking in young ages. Saudi Arabia is the 4th largest importer and 23th largest consumer of cigarettes in the world. Females of teens and young aged group are also smokers in Saudi Arabia. Approximately 5.7% are women out of total smokers' rate in Saudi Arabia. Mostly the young who are at college and secondary school levels are becoming heavy smokers.

A study was conducted by Koura R. M., Al-Dossary, F.A, Bahnassy, A.A (2011) conducted the study on female smokers. They came with the statistics which is shown below.

Figure: 1 Characteristics of female smokers



Their study highlighted that the average minimum age of female smokers is 17. This statistics shows that that there is prevalence of smoking in females and maximum smoking index is 20 which is enough high point.

Figure 2: Types of smoking among parents of ...