It is estimated that 1.25 billion men and women currently smoke cigarettes. And if this trend holds steady, tobacco will kill 1 billion people by the end of the century -- 10 times the amount of people who died from tobacco in the 20th century. Every one in five cancer deaths results from tobacco use -- worldwide, that's 1.4 million tobacco-related deaths every year. And lung cancer remains the major cancer among the 10.9 million new cases that are diagnosed annually. All this comes from the Cancer Atlas -- updated and released today along with the Tobacco Atlas and published by the American Cancer Society with assistance from the International Union Against Cancer, World Health Organization, and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.While improving nutrition and reducing infection can dramatically reduce cancer rates, reducing tobacco use would have the greatest global affect the number of cancer deaths. And if action is taken now, 2 million lives could be saved each year by 2020 and 6.5 million lives by 2040.
1. I don't know what action should be taken, I can't imagine a product more people are aware is bad for you.
If we're going to spend money on worldwide disease, I'll take something simple that people don't get voluntarily, something like malaria. There are millions of people that would kill to live long enough to even have the opportunity to get cancer.
Posted at 11:59PM on Jul 10th 2006 by textbook seller