The Population Reference Bureau

Guidance exists on the acceptable and unacceptable levels of risk behaviors for individuals but it is very challenging to translate those risks to a population. For example, if a young person smokes cigarettes, it is clear that in order to protect their health, they should quit. However, at what level should a larger group identify youth/adolescent smoking as a problem? The Global Tobacco Atlas has divided countries into four groups; low, medium, high, and exceedingly high prevalence. The population levels of smoking (for all ages) are below 7%, 7-15%, 16-29.9%, and 30% and above. Virtually no countries – and none in LAC – are in the high-prevalence category, so we used three levels of smoking for populations to identify low, medium, and high prevalence on our data sheet.