Smoking and Cancer

Every year 100,000 victims, that is one person every five minutes, die unnecessarily from the results of heavy smoking. There is ample, proven evidence of the disastrous effect of cigarettes on health.

The noxious components of tobacco are: tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide. It is the tar in the cigarette which causes lung cancer; it also causes cancer of the mouth, larynx, oesophagus, pancreas and bladder.

Surely every thinking man and woman in the Western world must now be fully aware of the direct link between smoking and lung cancer. The reason why people find it difficult to give it up, once they have started smoking regularly springs from the great physical and emotional dependence on cigarettes produced by the nicotine's pleasurable effects on our senses. Resisting the ever recurring craving for yet another cigarette never ceases throughout one's whole life and represents an ever-present potential threat. This is why it is so important not to start smoking, since weaning oneself off this addiction is so very difficult.

The risks from smoking are influenced by the number of cigarettes and their tar content. Low-tar cigarettes decrease the risk, but smoking two packets of low-tar cigarettes a day carries a higher lung-cancer death rate than one packet of high-tar cigarettes smoked in the same period.

If giving up smoking proves impossible, it is better to smoke not more than six low-tar cigarettes a day, not to inhale deeply and to stub each one out when halfway through. As already seen, the carcinogenic effect of cigarettes is enormously enhanced by alcohol.

The prevalence of smoking in the UK has declined in adult men by one-fifth in the last decade, and is decreasing in women. This is most marked among men in professional and similar occupations, where the proportion of smokers has decreased dramatically. At the other end of the social scale the number of smokers has remained practically constant and more and more youngsters are taking up the habit.

There are now 20 million non-smokers, 10 million ex-smokers and 18 million smokers in the UK. It was as recently as 1976 that for the first time there were more non-smokers than smokers in Britain.

The cost of medical care for the 108,000 people suffering from smoking-related diseases, who have to enter hospital each year, is £111 million. Of these 77,000 will die. Yet children below the age of 16 years spend at least £65 million on cigarettes every year.

A surprisingly quick beneficial effect in health follows the stopping of smoking, particularly in low-tar cigarette smokers, resulting in a substantial reduction in mortality in men under 50 years of age. Cigarette smokers who switch to small cigars run the same risk because most such smokers inhale the cigar smoke; this is not the case in large cigar smokers.

The risk from inhaled cigarette smoke for a 20 cigarette-a-day smoker, apart from the discomfort due to shortness of breath on the slightest exertion and the greater proneness to colds and coughs, is an average life-shortening of about eight years. Those who complain about air pollution from car exhausts and industrialisation should remember that there are 100,000 particles contained in each cubic centimetre of polluted air; by contrast, when smoking we suck in five billion particles per cubic centimetre of smoke directly through the mouth into the lung, without the protective filtering by the nose. Air pollution therefore plays a very minor health threat compared with the risks associated with smoking. Significantly, air in the house of smokers is considerably more polluted than the city air outside. It follows that people who are worried about the effect of air pollution on their lungs should ban smoking in the home as it is a serious occupational hazard.

Non-smoking wives of heavy smokers have a higher risk of developing lung cancer and this risk is the higher the greater the number of cigarettes smoked. What is more, in countries where only a small proportion of women smoke, the effect of passive 'smoking' on lung cancer in women actually becomes more important than that of direct smoking. A 14-year study of 265,000 Japanese men and women concluded that a husband who smoked 20 cigarettes-a-day doubled a non-smoking wife's risk of dying of lung cancer. These findings were confirmed by the American Cancer Society Study in 1981 and by the Louisiana study in 1983.

Estimates of the degree of risk incurred from 'passive smoking' can now be accurately assessed from measurements of urinary cotinine, a metabolite of nicotine, found in the urine of non-smokers breathing other people's smoke.

To conclude: Recent statistics show that 50 per cent of persons still smoking heavily by the age of 35, will be dead by 65; the other 50 per cent will have angina, or high blood pressure, or a stroke, or chronic bronchitis or a leg amputation.