More news on secondhand smoke

Secondhand smoke kills more than 600,000 people worldwide every year, according to a new study published in the British medical journal Lancet.

In the first look at the global impact of secondhand smoking, researchers analyzed data from 2004 for 192 countries. They found 40 percent of children and more than 30 percent of nonsmoking men and women regularly breathe in secondhand smoke.

Scientists then estimated that passive smoking causes about 379,000 deaths from heart disease, 165,000 deaths from lower-respiratory disease, 36,900 deaths from asthma and 21,400 deaths from lung cancer a year.

Altogether, those account for about 1 percent of the world's deaths. The study was paid for by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

"This helps us understand the real toll of tobacco," said Armando Peruga, a program manager at the World Health Organization's Tobacco-Free Initiative, who led the study.

Peruga said the approximately 603,000 deaths from secondhand smoking should be added to the 5.1 million deaths that smoking causes every year.