Albania has about 753 thousand smokers out of which 651 thousand are male smokers.
According to a WHO report on tobacco and cigar use, Albania is ranked among the countries where the tobacco is consumed most, along with Greece, Armenia, Georgia and Russia. This is only influenced by males, 51.1% of whom are smokers.
Only 7.9% of Albanian women smoke tobacco (102,000), one of the lowest ratios across Europe. Albania is one of the countries with the highest gender inequality in smoking, where women were “forbidden” to consume cigarettes.
For female sex smokers, it is also noted that smoking is more spread in the ages: 12.5% of women over 55 are consuming, while for the young girls smoking figures are constantly declining.
Indicators are positive mainly to all young people, where only one in five people aged 15-24 are smokers. These figures are among the lowest in Europe.
Men who are born between the 1950s and the 60s and 70s who consume more tobacco, but the figures are also high for those born before the ’90s.
600 thousand people are regular day smokers, and WHO estimates a slight increase in these figures by 2020, before this number follows the trend of other declining European countries.
One of the respiratory diseases related to smoking, tuberculosis, in our country shows relatively high figures compared to the European Union.
