New Surgeon General's Report Expands List of Diseases Caused by Smoking

U.S. Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona has released a new comprehensive report on smoking and health, revealing for the first time that smoking causes diseases in nearly every organ of the body.

The report, "The Health Consequences of Smoking: A Report of the Surgeon General," is published 40 years after the surgeon general's first report on smoking, which concluded that smoking was a definite cause of three serious diseases. This newest report finds that cigarette smoking is conclusively linked to diseases such as leukemia, cataracts, pneumonia and cancers of the cervix, kidney, pancreas, and stomach.

"We've known for decades that smoking is bad for your health, but this report shows that it's even worse than we knew," Dr. Carmona said. "The toxins from cigarette smoke go everywhere the blood flows. I'm hoping this new information will help motivate people to quit smoking and convince young people not to start in the first place."

The 2004 report concludes that smoking reduces the overall health of smokers, contributing to such conditions as hip fractures, complications from diabetes, increased wound infections following surgery, and a wide range of reproductive complications. For every premature death caused each year by smoking, there are at least 20 smokers living with a serious smoking-related illness. Another major conclusion, consistent with recent findings of other scientific studies, is that smoking so-called low-tar or low-nicotine cigarettes does not offer a heath benefit over smoking regular or "full-flavor" cigarettes.

In addition to the 960-page printed report, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a new interactive scientific database of more than 1,600 key articles cited in the report, available through the Internet (www.surgeongeneral.gov). The database can be used to find detailed information on the specific health effects of smoking as well as to develop customized analyses, tables and figures.

The database will be continually updated as new critical studies are published, allowing the surgeon general to determine on a regular basis whether the evidence supports a new definitive conclusion about smoking-caused disease.

Source: PACT

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