Tobacco is an agricultural product processed from the fresh leaves of the plants in the genus Nicotiana. It is a product made entirely or partly of leaf tobacco as raw material, which is intended to be smoked, sucked, chewed or sniffed. Tobacco products come in different

forms (manufactured, hand-rolled, filtered, unfiltered and flavored), cigars and pipes. All

contain the highly addictive psychoactive ingredient, nicotine. As they contain highly addictive Nicotine, use of tobacco causes high risk in our health, especially in heart, lungs and liver and as well as many cancerous diseases. Tobacco smoke contains many chemicals that are harmful to smokers and non-smokers.

Trend

Cigarette smoking is the most common form of tobacco use worldwide. Other tobacco products include water pipe tobacco, various smokeless tobacco products, cigars, cigarillos, roll-your-own tobacco, pipe tobacco, bidis and kreteks. In recent days’ trend of E-cigarettes is increasing. E-cigarettes are devices which heat a liquid to create an aerosol which is then inhaled by the user. E-cigarettes do not contain tobacco but are harmful to health and are not safe.

Over 80% of the 1.3 billion tobacco users worldwide live in low- and middle-income countries, where the burden of tobacco-related illness and death is heaviest.

Tobacco use continues to be a significant burden among the Nepalese. According to the recent STEPS Survey 2019 carried out by Nepal Health Research Council (NHRC), 28.9% of adults belonging to (15 – 69) years of age currently use tobacco in any form (smoked or smokeless) and this accounts to 3,800,000 adults. The overall prevalence rate of tobacco use was found to be 36.8% by NHRC in its study conducted between 2016 and 2018.