NEW DELHI: India is in the grips of a smoking epidemic that is likely to cause nearly a million deaths a year by 2010, more than half of them among poor and illiterate people, according to a study released on Thursday.

One in five of all male deaths and one in 20 of all female deaths between the ages of 30 and 69 will be caused by smoking, said the study, conducted by a team of doctors and scientists from India, Canada and Britain and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Opinion

Editorial

A difficult story
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