Using smokeless tobacco raises your risk of oral cancer by 80 percent and your risk of esophageal and pancreatic cancer by 60 percent, according to researchers who concluded that encouraging smokers to switch to smokeless products is bad public-health policy.

Paolo Boffetta of the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer said that there would be a net benefit if all smokers switched to smokeless tobacco, but, "The point is we don't know whether this would happen and there is no data to suggest these smokers would stop or switch."

Reuters reported July 1 that World Health Organization researchers reviewed 11 previously published studies on the health risks of chewing tobacco and snuff. "What we did was try to quantify the burden of smokeless cancer," said Boffetta.

Use of smokeless tobacco was found to be highest in the U.S., Sweden and India.

The research was published in the July 2008 issue of the journal Lancet Oncology.