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Targeting the Nation’s Leading Killer
At A Glance 2011
The Burden of Tobacco Use
Tobacco use is the single most preventable cause of disease, disability, and death in the United States. Each year, an estimated 443,000 people die prematurely from smoking or exposure to secondhand smoke, and another 8.6 million live with a serious illness caused by smoking. Despite these risks, approximately 46.6 million U.S. adults smoke cigarettes. Smokeless tobacco, cigars, and pipes also have deadly consequences, including lung, larynx, esophageal, and oral cancers.
The harmful effects of smoking do not end with the smoker. An estimated 88 million nonsmoking Americans, including 54% of children aged 3–11 years, are exposed to secondhand smoke. Even brief exposure can be dangerous because nonsmokers inhale many of the same poisons in cigarette smoke as smokers.
Secondhand smoke exposure causes serious disease and death, including heart disease and lung cancer in nonsmoking adults and sudden infant death syndrome, acute respiratory infections, ear problems, and more frequent and severe asthma attacks in children. Each year, primarily because of exposure to secondhand smoke, an estimated 3,000 nonsmoking Americans die of lung cancer, more than 46,000 die of heart disease, and about 150,000–300,000 children younger than 18 months have lower respiratory tract infections.
Coupled with this enormous health toll is the significant economic burden of tobacco use—more than $96 billion a year in medical costs and another $97 billion a year from lost productivity.
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Dear D,
America's love of "free" markets guarantees the right to sell poisonous products that kill hundreds of thousands of people a year while inflicting untold pain-and-dysfunction on millions of others.
Meanwhile the free marketeers proclaim -- with straight faces -- that it is not murder to kill these people, but "market dynamics" and "free choice."
The criminality disguised by "capitalism" would make Dante re-consider his design for the Inferno, devising an inner-most circle for people who profit "legally" by the deliberate induction of morbidity and mortality.
While America basks in its moral filth, Australia prepares to do the right thing.
In America, the deck is so stacked we can't even discuss doing the right thing.
We are too busy defending our alliances with The Prince of Darkness.
Pax
Alan
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