Half a century of anti-smoking
The fight against smoking in the United States has saved 8 million lives
ABC Magazine based on Yale University materials: 8 million lives saved since surgeon general's tobacco warning 50 years agoAbout 8 million lives have been saved over 50 years of the anti-smoking campaign in the United States.
This conclusion was reached by researchers at Yale University, whose results were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The report of the Chief Sanitary Doctor of the United States (Surgeon General of the United States) "Smoking and health" was taken as a starting point, in which for the first time at the state level it was announced the unconditional harm of smoking. The document was published on January 11, 1964 (its cover is in the picture on the right).
Professor of biostatistics Theodore R. Holford, as well as six of his colleagues who analyzed data from the National Bureau of Statistics, found that 17.6 million people have died from tobacco-related diseases in the country over the past 50 years. Meanwhile, this figure could have been 8 million more if not for the anti-smoking campaign.
Of the 8 million lives saved, approximately 5.3 million are men and 2.7 million are women. The total number of years of life saved is estimated at about 157 million, that is, 19.6 years for each beneficiary.
Professor Holford emphasizes that it was possible to reduce premature mortality by 31%, and in the first decade of the campaign this figure barely reached 11%, and from 2004 to 2012 it rose to 48%. A modern 40-year-old man, thanks to the refusal of cigarettes, lives about 7.8 years longer than his peer in 1964. For women, the difference is slightly less – 5.4 years.
The 1964 report was prepared by Luther Terry, the Chief Medical Officer of the United States, based on the results of the work of a special commission that studied more than 7 thousand scientific articles and involved more than 150 scientific consultants in the investigation.
The report, according to contemporaries, produced the effect of an exploding bomb and marked the beginning of a large-scale offensive against tobacco producers and smokers.
Article by Holford et al. Tobacco Control and the Reduction in Smoking-Related Premature Deaths in the United States, 1964-2012 (with numerous graphs and tables) published in open access in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
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