FACT CHECK: 72 per cent of women do not smoke cigarettes in Pakistan

The Claim: Pakistan Tobacco Board revealed that 72 per cent of Pakistan’s female population smoke cigarettes.

The Fact: Pakistan Tobacco Board (PTB)has not shared such statistics.

The Story: Media organizations in Pakistan carried a story citing PTB that 72% of the female population of the country smokes cigarettes. The story further said that these statistics were shared by the board during a sub-committee meeting of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC).

The story was first published on Aaj Urdu on July 19 and later published on Pro Pakistani the same day. It became viral after getting published on Geo English’s website, on July 23. It was also published in The News and Geo Urdu. However, it was later deleted by Geo Urdu, English and The News.

The Pakistan Tobacco Board, in a statement to Hum News, acknowledged that it currently lacks the necessary tools to collect such data and that there were no mechanisms to accurately determine the number of individuals who smoke in Pakistan, nor It can determine their genders and ages.

The board said it had presented no such data at any forum.

The Spread: Hum Fact check found that along with Geo News, similar headlines were used by Minute Mirror and Islamabad Post here and here. 

These stories, including the ones that were later deleted by the websites, were shared on the social media platform ‘X’, previously known as Twitter and can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

It was widely shared on Facebook too, the links can be found here, here, here, here, here and here.

What else?

Hum Fact Check reached out to the Managing Director of Social Policy and Development Centre Muhammad Asif Iqbal to get his views on the abnormaly high figures of female smokers mentioned in the stories. “As per my knowledge, this must be a fake figure,” he said.

He also shared a collaborative survey, that can be found here, conducted in 2014 by the World Health Organisation showing the smoking prevalence to be only 2.1 per cent among women in Pakistan.

The Verdict: In light of the rebuttal of the story by Pakistan Tobacco Board, the eventual deletion of the stories from their respective websites as well as by comparing figures from the WHO survey, it can be safely said that 72 per cent of women do not smoke cigarettes in Pakistan. The information is false.