Hard Hitting Anti-smoking Ads Coming

U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, MD, has unveiled a new ad campaign featuring stark and gruesome images of former smokers telling what life is like with a smoking-related disease. Tobacco kills nearly one-half million Americans every year. It is planned that these attention-grabbing stories will lead many to seek the resources they need to quit.PositiveTip:…

Smoking During Pregnancy Associated with Tobacco Dependence Among Offspring

An interesting study recently reported in the British Journal of Psychiatry asks the critical question of whether smoking during pregnancy is linked with smoking behaviors among children born to smoking mothers. There is already an abundance of research highlighting the problems faced by the babies of smoking mothers; this is a new twist.

Pot Leads the List

Tracking the use of illegal drugs is a challenge because of their illegality, but researchers from Australia estimate that 149 to 271 million people around the world use them. Pot (cannabis) is the most widely used. This study did not include hallucinogens, inhalants, anabolic steriods or ecstasy. For perspective, the WHO has estimated that illegal drug…

Prevent Your Own Cancer

Nearly 50% of all cancer deaths can be prevented. It is reliably estimated that lifestyle and environmental factors are responsible for 42% of the cancers in the United Kingdom. What is true in the UK is likely to be true in much of the industrialized world. The research looked at the contribution to cancer made by…

Tobacco Use

An estimated 440,000 people die from smoking - related causes each year in the United States. Nearly all smoking - related deaths occur after the age of 35, but the majority of adults who smoke began during adolescence. Eighty - two percent of adults who smoke started smoking before age 18, and virtually no adult…

The World is Killing Itself

For thousands of years humans have fallen to the illnesses served up by nature's villains. Infectious disease such as bubonic plague, malaria and tuberculosis have killed millions. But the tables have turned -- we are now killing ourselves at a higher rate than nature is killing us.The World Health Organization reveals this in the Global…

Smoking Reaches Your Toenails

Cigarette smoking is the primary cause of lung cancer throughout the world.The risk of developing lung cancer is related to the total dose of smoke to which you have been exposed during your lifetime. This can be estimated in several ways including: the number of cigarettes smoked per day, the depth of smoke inhalation, the…

Selling, Addicting and Killing

Major tobacco companies continue to expand business in the vulnerable middle- and low-income countries of the world. In fact, some analysts have called the tobacco industry "recession resistant". These companies report increased revenue and rising share values in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. How do you relate to this morally repugnant industry?PositiveTip: If you…

30th U. S. Surgeon General’s Smoking Report Issued

The U.S. Surgeon General has just released How Tobacco Smoke Causes Disease, exploring how smoking is responsible for nearly one in every five deaths and costs almost $200 billion in health expenditures and lost productivity per year. The principal message of the report is:There is NO risk-free level of exposure to tobacco smoke.Smoking leads to…

Esophageal Adenocarcinoma and Smoking

Should the abundance of evidence linking smoking to all manner of cancers not be sufficient, consider this: National Cancer Institute researchers have found that the odds ratio for esophageal adenocarcinomas is more than doubled in smokers compared with never smoking. The good news is that those who have quit for 10 years or more have…