Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (168 page)

About 8.6 million Americans have at least one serious illness caused by smoking. So for every person who dies of a smoking-related disease, twenty additional people suffer from at least one serious illness that is associated with smoking.
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Tobacco kills more people in two days than crack and cocaine kill in a year.
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Tobacco companies know that once hooked, females are less likely to quit than males.

Cigarettes are more addictive than heroin because taking smoke into the lungs immediately produces a profound drug effect in the brain. It’s like mainlining the most addictive substance in the world. Some kids are hooked after only one cigarette.

More than four thousand chemicals, including two hundred known poisons such as DDT, arsenic, formaldehyde, and carbon monoxide, are housed in tobacco.

Smoking and Specific Women’s Health Problems

The power of addiction and denial is nowhere more striking than the case of a pregnant patient who, despite a history of infertility, con tinues to smoke throughout her pregnancy. Consider the following data:

Smokers have a miscarriage rate that is twice as high as that of nonsmokers. These miscarriages are often of genetically normal fetuses.

Infants whose mothers smoke run double the risk of dying of SIDS.
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750 Secondhand smoke is also estimated to cause more than 202,000 asthma episodes and 790,000 pediatrician visits for middle ear infections.
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Smoking in pregnancy accounts for an estimated 20 to 30 percent of low-birth-weight babies, up to 14 percent of preterm deliveries, and some 10 percent of all infant deaths. Even full-term, healthy-looking babies of smokers have been found to have narrowed airways and reduced lung function at birth.
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Adult nonsmokers suffer from exposure to secondhand smoke as well, including 3,400 who die of lung cancer and 46,000 who die of heart disease annually in the United States.
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Smokers are at increased risk for cervical cancer, vulvar cancer, and abnormal Pap smears, possibly because smoking depletes vitamins C and A and beta-carotene, antioxidants that are somewhat protective against cancer.
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Smoking literally poisons the ovaries.

Smoking ages the skin more quickly than normal.

Lung cancer has now passed breast cancer as the number one cancer killer of women. (You
have
come a long way, baby!)