“Lung damage caused by smoking could cause an additional 18 million cases of tuberculosis (TB) and 40 million extra deaths from TB by 2050,” according to a study published on Tuesday in BMJ, Agence France-Presse reports. Researchers from the University of California at San Francisco derived the estimates “from a mathematic model of smoking trends and smoking’s impact on TB risk,” the news agency notes (10/5).

According to researcher Sanjay Basu and colleagues, “Smoking alone could undermine the worldwide goal of reducing TB mortality by half between 1990 and 2015,” BBC News writes (Briggs, 10/4). “If smoking rates were aggressively lowered, the TB deaths linked to smoking could decrease by 27 million by 2050,” the researchers estimate, according to WebMD/CBS News (Doheny, 10/4).