The World Health Organisation (WHO) has raised alarm over a growing wave of nicotine addiction among children, warning that e-cigarettes are fuelling an “alarming” public health crisis with millions of minors now hooked on vaping.

According to the UN health agency, children are on average nine times more likely than adults to vape in countries where data is available. It said the tobacco industry is aggressively marketing vapes as supposedly safer alternatives to cigarettes while deliberately targeting young people and getting them addicted to nicotine.

The WHO’s first-ever global estimate revealed that more than 100 million people are now vaping worldwide. “The numbers are alarming,” the agency said, noting that they include at least 86 million adults—mostly in high-income countries—and at least 15 million children aged between 13 and 15.

“E-cigarettes are fuelling a new wave of nicotine addiction,” Etienne Krug, WHO’s Director of Health Determinants, Promotion and Prevention, said in a statement. “They are marketed as harm reduction but, in reality, are hooking kids on nicotine earlier and risk undermining decades of progress.”

While global smoking rates have declined from 1.38 billion tobacco users in 2000 to 1.2 billion in 2024, the WHO warned that one in five adults worldwide remains addicted. The agency accused the tobacco industry of shifting strategies to maintain its market by introducing new nicotine products that appeal to younger demographics.

“Millions of people are stopping, or not taking up, tobacco use thanks to tobacco control efforts by countries around the world,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. In response, “the tobacco industry is fighting back with new nicotine products, aggressively targeting young people,” he added. “Governments must act faster and stronger in implementing proven tobacco control policies.”

The WHO disclosed that 12 countries are now seeing a rise in tobacco use, reversing years of decline. “These reversals are not just numbers — they represent millions more people at risk of disease, disability, and premature death in the years to come,” Jeremy Farrar, WHO’s Assistant Director-General for Health Promotion, Disease Prevention, and Care, told reporters.

He said smoking continues to kill over seven million people every year, while second-hand smoke claims more than one million additional lives. Farrar emphasised that smoking damages “every single part of the body” and condemned smoking indoors around children as “irresponsible and unacceptable.”