I was born in '69, so my formative years were the 70s - when smoking was socially acceptable, and permissable in virtually all public settings and fairly common. Even my father, who was a doctor, smoked. Of course, medical research already showed that smoking was a dangerous habit and as time went by it became both socially unacceptable and not permitted almost anywhere.
Throughout all of my school years, we were subjected to graphs, charts and study results showing that such-and-such % of deaths were attributed to smoking, that even second-hand smoke causes x number of deaths, etc.
Well, it’s 2011, you can’t even smoke in outdoor public parks any more, and there are vastly fewer smokers anyway. It just occurred to me that I’ve never seen any charts or graphs showing precisely how the drastic reduction in smoking has affected the general population. Surely, someone has done studies showing declines in the rates of lung cancer, emphysema & heart disease in our non-mostly smoke free society? What’s the straight dope?
If men have traditionally been more frequent smokers than women, it seems plausible women have more frequently been the non-smoking partner of a smoker. So their lung cancer rates might somehow have been skewed by being listed as non smokers but getting second hand smoke related illness anyway. It is odd that their lung cancer rate seems to be climbing as the percentage of female smokers seems to be falling.
In fact though while a high percentage of lung cancer victims are smokers, only a relatively low percentage of smokers go on to actually get lung cancer. There are many risks associated with tobacco smoke besides lung cancer so that alone probably isn’t a good barometer of the overall impact that reduced smoking might have on public health.
I pulled that from a .pdf, Cancer Facts and Figures 2010, by the American Cancer Society. You can see how lung cancer rates rose from 1930 to about 1990 and have been declining since. They are still the dominant form of cancer though (for both genders, as it happens). Back in 1930 liver, intestinal and prostate cancer all had higher mortalities for men. Lung cancer wasn’t #1 for women either.
Something seems wrong with that data. The number of smokers has been declining since the Seventies, but incidences lung cancer increased. I can accept that as the effects on former smokers.
Suddenly in 1991 the rate dives downward faster than it had been increasing. I am at a loss to explain how that occurred and I think the data is being tracked differently or there was a major contributing factor to lung cancer (chemical additives?) that was eliminated shortly before.
The rate of prostate cancer has a similar pattern at around the same point in time but I attribute that to increased attention to testing. Prostate cancer had not been receiving near the attention that lung cancer had been getting.
I recall a regular poster here posting about smokers in another thread here recently.
His basis gist was cancer (with some data to back it up) from smoking generally shows up about 20 years **after **you’ve been smoking for awhile. So, if the rates dive at after about 1990, then that means that smoking levels peaked somewhere around 1970, which roughly sounds about right to me.
Well if one hospital had the technology the first year, two hospitals had the technology the second year, four hospitals had technology the third year, etc.
I pulled that from a .pdf, Cancer Facts and Figures 2010, by the American Cancer Society. You can see how lung cancer rates rose from 1930 to about 1990 and have been declining since. QUOTE]
that link doesn’t work but here’s the link for the whole PDF:
on page 2 there’s a chart entitled : Age-adjusted Cancer Death Rates,* Males by Site, US, 1930-2006 which shows especially lung cancer rate deaths from 1930 to 2006.
Looking at the twenty year segment from 1945 to 1965 during which time the US military exploded ~215 nuclear devices into our atmosphere, you see that is when lung cancer rates started to dramatically increase, continuing to do so for an equal twenty year segment from 1965 to 1985.
Coincidence? I don’t think so.
The US government needs to make reparations for their colossal act of terrorism against their own populace and against world population for that matter, since radiation from those blasts dispersed around the globe.
Realizing that our government is already in debtor status (which certainly limits any financial recompence), the best way for them to make those reparations is to grow, process, and stockpile cannabis concentrates, the one sure medicinal treatment to alleviate both the symptoms and growth of all forms of cancer, to provide those that suffer from lung cancer some relief.
I’m actually surprised at the change in smoking on college campuses in 2000-ish and now. Back 2000-ish when I was in college (in Virginia), there were huge crowds of smokers (many of them young-ish students) huddling near doors smoking up a storm, but when I’ve been back on campus in more recent times I see a lot less. True, there was a smoker or two, but there wasn’t six smokers per entrance like the old days. Maybe I’m biased on this because I’m not really seeing the campus every day like a full time student, so maybe it’s still the same way, but I am doubting it and I think there’s been some real change.
Uh, what? I see a significant increase continuing since the beginning of the period, not just within a 20 year interval starting around 1965, and it very closely follows this graph (per capita cigarette consumption, source page) with a lag.
Of course, if you are a zombie, smoking doesn’t matter.
Yes, lung cancer rates increased significantly since the beginning of atmospheric nuclear testing and continued to increase for over 20 years after US atmospheric nuclear testing ceased.
Zombie or not, you cannot dismiss the extreme likelihood of increased atmospheric nuclear radiation causing increased rates of lung cancer, just because cigarette smoking follows the same pattern.
