Smoking Increases Active Tuberculosis Risk

According to a Taiwan study, smoking increases risk of developing active tuberculosis in people who smoke compared to people who have never smoked.

18,000 people of Taiwan were tracked in the study for more than three years. The lead author Hsien-Ho Lin, a postdoctoral research fellow from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, wrote that there is two-fold increase in the risk of active TB in current smokers compared with those who have never smoked.

One in three people in the world is infected with TB but 90 percent of these will remain latent infections. The remaining 10 percent will develop active TB and fall sick at some point in their lives because of weak immune systems.

Read more at Reuters