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The top ten smokers countries, identified by Forbes magazine include Kenya, Turkey, Namibia, Yemen, Guinea, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, Mongolia, Nauru and Sao Tome and Principe.

Thanks to celebrity activism and widespread media attention, the magazine notes, HIV, malaria and starvation are well-known diseases of the third world.

But there's another resource-draining plague afflicting these countries - smoking.

While the smoking population is half what it was a generation ago in the US and other industrialised nations, with only one in five using tobacco, it's different in Africa

and East Asia, where time stands still when it comes to cigarettes, it says.

Smoking rates of 40 per cent or more of the population are common in these regions and medical services are limited.

In Turkey, for example, 44 per cent of its 71.5 million population smokes, draining USD 22.4 billion annually which accounts for 5.8 per cent of its GNI of 384.3 billion

dollars.

Around 45 per cent of Yemen's population smokes costing USD one billion to its economy annually and accounts for 6.2 per cent of GNI.

Societal costs in those countries, Forbes says, can't be calculated the same way they would be in the US, where most studies measure how much smokers burden taxpayers with extra medicare and medicaid payments.

For poor countries, there is no medicare-like programme to fund.

Nor is there enough data about the economic impact of other diseases to make real comparisons