Diseases Caused By Smoking
Diseases caused by smoking are prolific in society due to the decades of cultural acceptance of the deadly habit. Research has shown that smoking causes a myriad of complications and the medical writers at Paper Masters are ready to help you flush them out in a custom written research paper. Below is an example of some of the topics and information that can be obtained or you can create the direction of your project yourself.
Smoking has been shown to cause a variety of health complications and illnesses. The main diseases that are caused by smoking include the following:
- Lung cancer
- Respiratory disease
- Lower respiratory tract infections
- Developmental and cardiovascular problems
- Childhood asthma
Currently, cigarette smoking is blamed for 440,000 deaths a year. Current research indicates that 38,000 nonsmokers die each year due to breathing secondhand smoke.
A Harvard Medical School Health Letter put the negative impact of smoking in comparative form. According to the publication, war has resulted in 3 million years of life lost while cigarette smoking has resulted in over 30 million years of life lost. According to the World-watch Institute based in Washington, D.C., approximately 20 percent of all deaths can be traced back to cigarette smoke. Experts estimate that smoking costs U.S. businesses anywhere from $27 billion to $61 billion a year in lost productivity due to employee illness. Other statistics indicate fires caused by smoking results in the loss of 1,500 lives and 4,000 injuries a year.
Concern over the dangers associated with environmental smoke led to the passage of more restrictive smoking regulations in public places, including bars and restaurants. These regulations vary from city to city and from place to place. Some cities ban smoking in public places altogether while others allow bar, restaurant, and hotel owners to enact their own polices ranging from complete smoking restrictions to designated areas for smoking.
Smoking regulations are designed to achieve state and federal policy objectives. Many of these policies are designed to limit the access of cigarettes for teenagers while others are aimed at protecting nonsmokers from the dangers of toxic cigarette smoke. The first anti-smoking laws were passed to reduce the fire hazards caused by smoking while later restrictions centered on the morality of smoking. In the first half of the twentieth century restrictions on smoking fell in priority as smoking grew in popularity and states realized significant economic gains from cigarette taxes.
Beginning in the 1960s smoking bans based on moral grounds begin to gain in popularity once again. During the 1980s the anti-smoking movement took off as more doctors spoke out on the dangers associated with firsthand and secondhand smoke. As early as the 1930s doctors linked cigarette smoking to increases in the number of patients suffering from lung cancer and in the 1940s researchers began investigating the connection between cigarette smoking and heart disease. In 1990 another study suggested childhood exposure to secondhand smoke is responsible for 17 percent of lung cancers in adulthood.
Regulations passed at the federal level are intended to achieve multiple purposes. Attempts to regulate smoking at the federal level are hampered by Congress's actions of providing subsidies for tobacco farmers and the large amount of political power welded by the . At the same time Congress has responded to medical warnings about the dangers of cigarette smoking, but not to the levels hoped for. In 1965 Congress passed the Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, which required tobacco companies to include health warnings on all cigarette packages. The required label read, "Caution: Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health". This label was much milder than the label proposed by the Federal Trade Commission that read, "Cigarette smoking is dangerous to health and may cause death from cancer and other diseases". The adoption of the milder law suggests Congress was attempting to please medical professionals and the powerful tobacco industry at the same time. This is also apparent in that the Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act prevented states from requiring more "stringent" health warnings.