41.2% of employers in Egypt are smokers: CAPMAS

The Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) said that 41.2% of employers in Egypt are smoking, adding that 34.1% of paid workers smoke.

In a recent report on the occasion of World No Tobacco Day, which is organised by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 31 May annually to highlight the health risks of tobacco use and advocating for effective policies to reduce tobacco consumption, CAPMAS said that the lowest percentage was recorded among individuals outside of the labour force. 3.5% of unemployed citizens do not smoke, most of them students and housewives.

CAPMAS noted that the average annual expenditure of the Egyptian household on smoking (whether the household has smokers or not) was EGP 1,722. As for families that do smoke, the average spending amounts to EGP 3,968, which is EGP 331 per month.

Moreover, CAPMAS said that 20.2% of the total population (15 years and over) are smokers, which represented 12.6 million people according to the population estimated in 2016. The proportion of smokers among men was 38.5%, compared to 1.5% among women.

In addition,18.8% of the population smokes daily, according to CAPMAS, and about 23.8% of youth in the age group (25-44) are smokers.

It added that 31.5% of the literate and who can read and write are smokers, and this percent was 14.5% among those who obtained university certificate.

It pointed out that about 23 million people are exposed to passive smoking because of the presence of one or more smokers in the household. Half of passive smokers are women, meaning that they are not immune to the risk of smoking, although the proportion of female smokers is low.