Smoking Health Risks


by Waller Jamison - Date: 2007-04-24 - Word Count: 361 Share This!

The government makes sure we are aware of smoking health risks by requiring labels on every pack of cigarettes sold. But do these harsh warnings like "Smoking Kills", and taking up most of the front and back of the packet get the message home? Recent TV campaigns have taken this one step further by showing people who are dying of cancer or emphysema and having them warn the public of the risks.

There is a long list of potentially fatal illnesses which can be directly attributed to smoking or passive smoking. These include not only lung cancer, but also a number of other cancers, some of them related to the respiratory tract, but others in different parts of the body such as the bladder and kidneys.

Although the percentage of smokers in the population has gone down significantly since the fifties, when the health risks of smoking were not well known, there are still a high percentage of people who smoke. In fact around 1000 hospital admissions per week in the UK are directly related to smoking. In the fifty year period before 2000, it is thought that throughout the world approximately 60 million people died because of smoking.

And smoking-related illnesses are still responsible for about a fifth of all deaths in the UK and in the US it's getting close to half a million per year. Yet all of these deaths are preventable. So why are we not heeding the warnings?

Perhaps the reason is that so many people start smoking young, at a time when they feel well and very fit and so the effects are not immediately obvious. For some reason, we seem to think that it will be easy to stop, despite knowing that smoking is highly addictive. Some people will stop when they start to feel the effects in the form of less serious, but nonetheless, unpleasant illnesses such as bronchitis or frequent colds. Others may eventually stop when they become ill with one of the less common smoking-related illnesses such as Crohn's Disease or ulcers. Many will wait until it is too late, but why do that when smoking health risks are so well documented?

© Waller Jamison 2007


Related Tags: risks of smoking, smoking health risks, health risks of smoking

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Waller Jamison is qualified in acupuncture and reflexology and now focuses on writing and website development.

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