Almost 160,000 kids start smoking habit every year in the UK, anti-tobacco scientists warned. The 157,000 children aged 11 to 15 who take up the smoking habit every year could fill 5,200 classrooms, reported the Cancer Research UK.
The charity, which supports a move to plain packs for cigarettes, declared that eight out of ten people begin their smoking habit before they are 19 year old and much more legislation is needed for to prevent minors start this habit.
The data refers to the amount of kids in an age group who were smoking cigarettes a year after first understood that they are real smokers.
Nearly a million of children under-15s – and more than a quarter (27 per cent) of all minors – have tried to smoke a cig at least once. Among 12-year-olds alone, 1 percent were smoking every day in 2009, another 2 percent smoked tobacco only occasionally and 2 percent of them said that they used to smoke. Then in 2010, as 13-year-olds, 3 percent of kids smoked regularly, 2 percent smoked occasionally and 4 percent of then said that they used to smoke.
Jean King, Cancer Research UK’s director of smoking control, explained: “Too many kids start smoking yearly. We must act to bring this crazy smokers amount down.”