{"id":1052,"date":"2014-01-09T10:54:38","date_gmt":"2014-01-09T09:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ijph.blogs.springer.com\/?p=1052"},"modified":"2014-01-09T10:54:38","modified_gmt":"2014-01-09T09:54:38","slug":"happy-50th-birthday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/ijph\/general-public-health\/happy-50th-birthday\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy 50th birthday smoking awareness!"},"content":{"rendered":"

This Saturday use a lighter. Not to light a cigarette, of course, but only the virtual candles of the birthday cake of smoking awareness. For on January 11th 1964, the Surgeon General<\/a> of the United States, Luther Terry<\/a>, produced a 387 page report<\/a> connecting smoking to lung cancer. (technically, there have been other reports prior to that, amongst which from the Royal College of Physicians<\/a> in march 1962. But who wants to wait until March to eat cake? \ud83d\ude09 )<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"cigarette-cake\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This report had a big effect on the way people viewed smoking and public health in general. Fifty years after its publication, smoking rates in the United states have been cut in half <\/a>and an estimated 8 million lives were saved. The reduction in the percentage of smokers has been globally reduced, as shown at this paper<\/a> very recently published in JAMA: From 1980 to 2012 the percentage of male smokers has dropped from 41.2% to 31.1% and of females from 10.6% to 6.2% (although the absolute number of smokers has increased<\/a> and is now approaching one billion- the increase being attributed to population increase).<\/p>\n

We have just published a 24-year follow-up study on smoking in Sweden. <\/a>This study, by P.Midl\u00f6v and colleagues,\u00a0 showed significant decreases in smoking prevalence in Sweden: Thirty-four percent of men smoked in 1980 compared to about 14% in 2005, whereas 32% of women smoked in 1980 compared to 19% in 2005. There were significant decreases in all levels of education, however this was less the case in women with low educational level.<\/p>\n

When looking at the numbers reported in JAMA report for Sweden (covering a period from 1980 to 2012), we see similar trends: 12% of men smoked in 2012 (compared to 30% in 1980) whereas 15% of women smoked in 2012 (compared to 29% in 1980). Both in our paper and the JAMA report, the observed reduction is between 18 and 20% for men and about 13% for women.<\/p>\n

What is happening to your country?<\/p>\n

picture credit<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This Saturday use a lighter. Not to light a cigarette, of course, but only the virtual candles of the birthday cake of smoking awareness. For on January 11th 1964, the Surgeon General of the United States, Luther Terry, produced a 387 page report connecting smoking to lung cancer. (technically, there have been other reports prior… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":301,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10,11],"tags":[801,859,896],"class_list":["post-1052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-public-health","category-hot-off-the-press","category-international-journal-of-public-health","tag-smoking","tag-sweden","tag-tobacco"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/ijph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/ijph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/ijph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/ijph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/301"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/ijph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1052"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/ijph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1052\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/ijph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/ijph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/ijph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}