Posted on 07/10/2006 12:47:50 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON - If current trends hold, tobacco will kill a billion people this century, 10 times the toll it took in the 20th century, public health officials said Monday.
Tobacco accounts for one in five cancer deaths, or 1.4 million deaths worldwide each year, according to two new reference guides that chart global tobacco use and cancer. Lung cancer remains the major cancer among the 10.9 million new cases of cancer diagnosed each year, according to the Cancer Atlas.
Reducing tobacco use would have the greatest affect on global cancer rates, health officials said. Improving nutrition and reducing infection by cancer-causing viruses and bacteria could also cut rates dramatically, they said.
"We know with cancer, if we take action now, we can save 2 million lives a year by 2020 and 6.5 million by 2040," said Dr. Judith Mackay, a World Health Organization senior policy adviser.
The new Cancer Atlas and updated Tobacco Atlas were released Monday at a International Union Against Cancer conference. The American Cancer Society published the two atlases with help from the Union, WHO and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"Even if smoking rates decline worldwide, there will be a constant or even slightly increasing number of smokers due to population increases," said Michael Eriksen, director of the Institute of Public Health at Georgia State University.
An estimated 1.25 billion men and women smoke cigarettes now, according to the Tobacco Atlas.
Tobacco doesn't kill people, people kill themselves.
This must be making the Zero Population Growth folks ecstatic.
--
well, the ones that don't smoke, anyway.
Nobody will hold a gun to your head and make you shop at Walmart, or buy cigarettes.
If you don't pay taxes they will come after your house, and then they will come after you. First with blue suits, and then later with guns.
"This must be making the Zero Population Growth folks ecstatic."
I'd like to ban them, too. More room (and food) for my ever expanding brood.
Geez, I sound like termites or cockroaches or something...
But that was the guise of the tobacco settlement. To cover the states health costs because of smoking. Just have your brother get checked out and apply for it.
Instead of banning smokes, we should ban the bungheads who pull these big bogus numbers out of their butts and think we can't smell the associated stink.
Banning smoking never fed a hungry child....
"The "Heart" causes more deaths!!! because it Stops.."
Don't tell a lefty that. You'll only confuse them!
You gotta die with something. Why not smoking?
What happens when the world fills up with all these bilions of people who dont die because smoking didnt kill them?/ They die with something else.
Stopping smoking wont stop Cancer My Grandmother didnt smoke, My mother didnt smoke. My cousin is dying with cancer right now --she doesnt smoke.
I usd to work with this old man in his 80's he smoked Cigars, when he wasnt chewing them, he drank liquor and he joked that when he died people would say. "Smoking and Whiskey killed that old man" I suppose in a way it did . He got drunk one night and went to sleep smoking in bed and died in the fire. He was 92.
Smoking, a voluntary behavior (at least for the first smoke), may kill one billion this century.
...like that's working.
If you allow the time period to fill this century everyone who ever smoked would be dead along with the authors of this report; the hangup is that we have a new illness now, they call it premature death and it is defined by the health nazis as dying before you're done paying taxes
This looks like a job for . . . CAPTAIN HYPERBOLE!
Close, it's the air where I exhale all my tobacco smoke; every time I read one of these tirades, I light up two more ciggies and let them burn in the ashtray outside in the hopes they will find the spillers of this bilge. :)
I think you're on to something - the nanny state folks are those who were brought up on "don't trust anyone over thirty" and discovered sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. Now that they are a bit older and "feeling your pain" they have taken a different tack - immortality, which they expect to effect by self-denial, jogging, forbiddance of all pleasureable activities like smoking, drinking, foods of recognizeable and desirable caloric content etc. etc.
lung cancer is an old peoples disease. less than 3% of all lung cancers occur in people 45 & younger.
lung cancer rates are declining for all age groups.
I would guess that all told, about 6.4 billion people will die this century.
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