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Cigarettes: the most successful product ever?

By James M Heather, on 20 May 2013

On 14 March, sandwiched between the UK national No Smoking Day and the international World No Tobacco Day, a lunch hour lecture explored what might be the most successful product ever: cigarettes.

Cigarette courtesy of  Fried Dough on Flickr

Cigarette courtesy of
Fried Dough on Flickr

Deputy director of Cancer Research UK and UCL Cancer Trials Centre Professor Allan Hackshaw reminded us all just why cigarettes are so terrible.

There were a billion smokers in 2010. That’s a big number, and it’s going up, despite all that’s known about the health risks that smoking brings.

That might seem strange, until you look at how much each side of the table spends. In 2011, the US spent $457 million to reduce tobacco-related harm.

However, the tobacco industry spent more than $8 billion promoting, marketing and advertising their products, which makes it a little easier to understand why a product that kills half its consumers is still finding new ones.

In recent years, this advertising money is mostly targeting the developing world, with their big populations, growing economies and, typically, less well funded public health systems. In 2010, China alone accounted for nearly a third of the total revenue of the total tobacco income.

The talk didn’t dwell on the ‘popular’ reasons not to smoke: the 10 years, on average, that it knocks off your life, the enormous financial cost (which is felt most keenly in the lower income working households that remain those most likely to smoke in the west), or just the plain old nasty smell.

Instead, Professor Hackshaw took us through some of the lesser known diseases associated with tobacco inhalation. Everybody knows about the massively increased change of developing heart disease or lung cancer. However, as these are so serious some of the other conditions tend to get overlooked.

Smoking causes an increased risk of developing a whole host of serious, chronic non-fatal diseases, in addition to the serious acute ones that kill you. The list of them is as broad as it is long and they affect almost every biological system, including a 100% increase in risk for gastrointestinal disorders.

It’s also important to remember that passive smoking can increase the risk of all of the non-fatal conditions as well as the fatal ones.

Perhaps the most startling statistic was that one in seven women in the UK smoked through their pregnancies. This is despite the huge increase in risk of premature birth, low birth weight, lifelong chronic health conditions for the child, or even miscarriage.

In the developed world, slow progress is being made. Public smoking bans are common, non-smoking is considered ‘the norm’ and most smokers say they want to quit, all of which might have been thought completely unlikely 50 years ago.

This progress is linked closely to public health efforts to reduce the amount of smoking. Children get educated about the health risks, advertisements are restricted, tobacco increasingly costs more and packets feature warnings, all of which helps to  stop unnecessary or premature deaths.

Australian cigarette packaging is even coloured olive green, as it was shown to be the most off-putting colour.

It’s important to keep up efforts like these, and try new ones, if we’re to prevent the massive amounts of death and disease caused by tobacco intake.

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