*During the 20th century, smoking ed about 100 million people worldwide.
*Every 30 seconds someone somewhere in the world s of lung cancer. It is the ninth most common cause of in the world and the most common form of cancer. Each year 1.25 million people from it. — Roy Castle International Centre for Lung Cancer Research
*Tobacco s one person every ten seconds and is set to ten million people a year by 2025. — World Health Organization
*Each year more Americans from smoking-related diseases than from abuse, car accidents and combined.
*390,000 Americans each year from the effects of cigarette smoking. Smoking has been responsible for 16% (or 1 in 6) of all s in the U.S. each year.
*Half of all smoking-related s occur between the ages of 35 and 69, which translates into an average of roughly 23 years of life lost.
*Insurance companies have estimated that smoking a single cigarette lowers one’s life expectancy by 10.7 minutes. That means in smoking a packet of 20 life is shortened by more than three and a half hours.
*Cigarettes are the most heavily advertised products in the U.S. Tobacco companies spend over $5,000 per minute on advertising and promotion of tobacco products. Smoking costs the nation $65 billion per year in health-care costs and lost productivity — that’s $262 per American per year.
*In 1997 cigarette smoking accounted for an estimated 117,400 of the total 628,000 s in the United Kingdom. Cigarette smoking is thus responsible for approximately one in every five s in Britain. This annual mortality translates into an average of 2,300 people ed by smoking every week, 320 every day, and 13 every hour. — Royal College of Physicians
*About 40 percent of America’s 50 million smokers will try to kick the habit at least once this year. Fewer than one in ten will succeed. — Center for Disease Control and Prevention
*Road accidents, and drugs and solvents all . Smoking s five times more people before their time than all these other causes of put together. Smoking is the biggest single cause of preventable disease and premature in this country. — Smoking and Your Child, issued by Britain’s Department of Health
*The humble cigarette is responsible for a dozen times more s in the UK in the past 40 years than British casualties from World War II — over five million. This is not a cold statistic but a human tragedy. — Sir George Albert, Royal College of Physicians
*Pregnant women who smoke have higher rates of miscarriage, , premature birth, and complications of pregnancy. More of their babies soon after birth from crib than the newborns of nonsmoking mothers.
*In 1996 more than 336,000 Australian schoolchildren smoked a total of more than 370 million cigarettes.
*Smoking harms not just the smoker, but also family members, coworkers, and others who breathe the smoker’s cigarette smoke, called second-hand smoke.
