Fewer people are smoking but the tobacco epidemic is far from over, the World Health Organisation says.

A new WHO global report shows the number of tobacco users has dropped from 1.38 billion in 2000 to 1.2 billion in 2024.

Since 2010, the number of people using tobacco has declined by 120 million - a 27 per cent drop in relative terms.

But the WHO warned that one in five adults worldwide are currently still addicted to tobacco, fuelling millions of preventable deaths every year.

"Millions of people are stopping, or not taking up, tobacco use thanks to tobacco control efforts by countries around the world," WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement marking the organisation's tobacco trends report.

According to the WHO, the decline in tobacco consumption is

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