“The share of adults in India who use tobacco halved between 2000 and 2022, dropping from 50 percent to 24 percent,” reports The Doomslayer.
India is now the world’s most populous country, with an estimated 1,476,625,576 people. China is the second most populous country, with an estimated 1,412,914,089 people.
Tobacco use has fallen a lot in India. “At the turn of the millennium, one-in-five adults in India smoked tobacco, and almost half of all adults were using any form of tobacco, including products that are chewed or sniffed. But over the past two decades, rates of both have roughly halved,” notes Our World in Data.
Five years ago, China was the most populous country on Earth. But today, India has more people, because India’s population is still growing, while China’s population is declining due to a low birth rate. China’s birth rate fell partly due to its former one-child policy forbidding many couples from having more than one child, which made small families seem more normal. “The one-child policy was a controversial population planning initiative in Mainland China implemented between 1979 and 2015 to curb the country’s population growth by restricting many families to a single child.”
Before 1750, India often had more people than China. But from around 1750 to 2021, China had more people than India, especially from 1800 to 1850, when China had roughly twice as many people as India.
Parasites invaded a woman’s brain after she visited India.
Annual rabies cases have fallen by 12,000 in India, down to about 6,000 cases. That’s due to sterilization of stray dogs, which has led to fewer dog bites.
Malaria cases have fallen by 80 percent in India since 2015.
In 1947, India had an estimated 25 million cases of Guinea worm. Guinea worms are nasty parasites that caused tens of millions of people to scream with unbearable pain. But India managed to eradicate its Guinea worms by 1996. “The unbearable, burning pain of a Guinea worm occurs when the meter-long female worm secretes a toxic acid to burst through the skin, typically on the lower legs or feet. There are no vaccines or medicines to kill the worm inside the body. Relief and recovery require a specialized, step-by-step extraction process.”
