50 years ago, a first American report established the link between tobacco and lung cancer, highlighting for the first time the dangers of cigarettes. Today, the pathologies linked to smoking and passive smoking are no longer confined to the lungs. It is a fact, almost all the organs of the body are attacked by this nicotine poison, and prevention policies do not change anything: “Half a century after the publication of the first report of the American Surgeon General, which established for the first time a link between cigarettes and lung cancer, the already long list of diseases caused by tobacco and passive smoking continues to grow”, worries Dr Boris Lushniak, the acting General Surgeon, author of a new report on tobacco which takes stock of half a century of tobacco control.
Since the first publication of the report in the United States in 1964, the quantified damage caused by smoking suggests a carnage: more than twenty million Americans have died from the harmful effects of cigarettes, including around 2.5 million from lung cancer and cardiovascular disease due to passive smoking.
The cigarette spares nothing
The risks of cigarettes are very real, demonstrates (if it is still necessary) Dr. Lushniak before drawing up a small summary of the damage to health: “This new report indicates that smoking also contributes to macular degeneration linked to age (AMD), diabetes, liver cancer, complications in people with cancer and those recovering from it, as well as tuberculosis, erection problems, hare’s lip in newborns, to ectopic pregnancies, arthritis, inflammation and immune dysfunctions.
This report once again confirms what the health authorities and scientists, with the help of numerous studies, are striving to demonstrate, namely that tobacco is one of the greatest scourges of our society. In the United States, as in France, active smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death. In France, it is responsible for 90% of lung cancers and 73,000 premature deaths.
