ABSTRACT
In 1999 September a cross-sectional analytic study was conducted in 29 townships of Mandalay. Magwe and Bago divisions of Myanmar. Randomly selected 2074 urban and 1781 rural 15-24 year old youths from 4808 households were interviewed. 5.6 per cent of females and 67.6 per cent of male youths reported as current smokers. At age 14, 37 per cent of the boys smoked. At age 17, more than half of males smoked, and, at age 22 and older, nearly 80 per cent of them were already smoking. Girls started smoking later than boys. Only 1 per cent of 15-year-old girls smoked. When the females reached age 22-24, approximately 10 per cent of them smoked. Comparing different youth cohorts, the younger started smoking earlier than the older youths. Median age of starting tobacco smoking for the 16 year old males was 16; that was approximately 3 years earlier than the median age of smoking for the 24 years old males.