Jan 28, 2014 – Smoking Impact

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ANCHOR LEAD: HOW MANY DEATHS ARE DUE TO CIGARETTE SMOKING? ELIZABETH TRACEY REPORTS

On the fiftieth anniversary of the first surgeon general’s report on the health impact of cigarette smoking, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a comprehensive look at where we are today. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, reviews the sobering statistics.

NELSON: Something on the order of fifty percent of the men in the world, ten percent of the women in the world are current smokers, probably responsible, cigarette smoking itself, for five million deaths a year. There’s an estimate that cigarette smoking caused a hundred million deaths in the 21st century and if the current smoking trends continue unabated that cigarette smoking will be responsible for a billion deaths in the current century. We need many tactics including making it more difficult to start smoking, more difficult to sustain smoking and easier for people who’ve become addicted to cigarette smoking to give up cigarette smoking in pursuit of better health. :35

At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.