Tobacco kills more than five million people a year, the World Health Organization says. (CBC)

Only about five per cent of the world's population was covered by smoking bans last year, the World Health Organization reported Wednesday.

Tobacco is a leading preventable cause of death that kills more than five million people a year, the United Nations health agency said in its Global Tobacco Epidemic report

Yet in 2008, only 5.4 per cent of the global population was protected by bans on smoking indoors in public places, up from 3.1 per cent in 2007, according to the report.

Second-hand smoke kills around 600,000 people prematurely each year, and causes illnesses and economic losses costing tens of billions of dollars annually, the WHO said.

Since there is no safe level of exposure to second-hand smoke, government action is needed to protect people, said Dr. Ala Alwan, the WHO's assistant director-general for non-communicable diseases.

Some progress has been made, with 2.3 per cent of the world's population, or around 154 million people, newly covered by smoke-free laws in 2008.

Most deaths in poorest countries

Over the past 40 years, smoking rates have fallen in developed countries, but the global annual death toll from tobacco could still rise to eight million by 2030, the agency said.

"More than 80 per cent of those premature deaths would occur in low- and middle-income countries — in other words, precisely where it is hardest to deflect and bear such tremendous losses," the report says.

Last year, seven countries — Colombia, Djibouti, Guatemala, Mauritius, Panama, Turkey and Zambia — brought in comprehensive laws to make public, indoor spaces smoke-free, raising the total to 17 countries.

The WHO urged governments to implement its framework convention on tobacco control.

So far, 170 nations have ratified the convention, which urges countries to:

• Monitor tobacco use and the policies to prevent it.
• Protect people from tobacco smoke.
• Offer people help to quit tobacco use.
• Warn about the dangers of tobacco.
• Enforce bans on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship.
• Raise taxes on tobacco.

But measures like increasing taxes on tobacco products and banning advertising don't address the root causes of why people smoke, said Patrick Basham, director of the Democracy Institute, a London- and Washington-based think-tank.

"It's like the well-intentioned blind leading the blind," Basham said in suggesting officials focus on anti-poverty measures to reduce smoking, although that would fall beyond the WHO's mandate.

With files from The Associated Press