Raising cigarette taxes saves children's lives - According to study, the measures could avoid 281,000 deaths per year
More than a quarter of a million deaths among children under the age of five could have been avoided in low-income countries in a single year if they had increased their existing cigarette taxes, a new analysis has found.
Exposure to smoke can harm the health of young children, worsening asthma, impairing their lung function, and making infants more vulnerable to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
This exposure can affect them even before they are born, as it increases the risk of premature birth and low birth weight.
To help reduce smoking rates, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that countries tax cigarettes at a rate of 75 percent of their retail price. But few low- and middle-income countries have done this.
According to new estimates, which were published in the journal The Lancet Public Health, about 281,000 deaths in children under the age of five could have been avoided with cigarette taxes at the level of 75%, which is 6% of the 4.7 million young children who died in 2021.
The study found that higher taxes on cigarettes would increase child survival rates more among people with low incomes than among their wealthier peers, reducing disparities in child deaths in these regions.
But by 2020, only 10 of the 94 countries in the study had increased cigarette duties to at least 75% of their retail value.
Avoiding 74,000 deaths in the poorest families
In the remaining 84 countries, tax increases could avert nearly 70,000 child deaths in the poorest families and more than 36,000 deaths in the richest groups in 2021, the estimates show.
But other factors are bigger contributors to under-five mortality in low-income countries, such as infectious diseases or those spread by mosquitoes.
Some of the same authors had previously shown how rising cigarette prices could affect infant mortality across the globe, and specifically in 23 European Union countries. In both cases, they found that higher prices meant more babies survived past their first birthdays.
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