May's Issue of Woman's Health Magazine reports: When a Fit Body Fails You

Being active, not smoking, and eating right can go a long way toward protecting you against lung cancer. But it's not always enough.

Emily Miner gave up smoking at age 6. "I was on a camping trip with my cousins," the 39-year-old Californian recalls. As the family sat around the campfire, her uncle lit a cigar. Intrigued by the sharp scent of the smoke, Emily persuaded him to let her try it. "I took a huge puff and turned green," she says. "That was it for me."

Thirty years later, Emily was a picture of healthy living: She ran a family winery in Napa Valley with her husband, Dave, had two young daughters, and was training for a half—marathon. So the discovery that a deadly disease was ravaging her was nothing short of shocking.

It started out as back pain, a recurring twinge. When an MRI showed a tumor on her spine and spots on her lungs, Emily and her oncologist assumed it must be breast cancer that had spread, a diagnosis not unknown in young, healthy women. No one was prepared for the biopsy result, which showed that Emily had lung cancer that had metastasized to her spine.

The number of lung cancer deaths among American women has grown by 600 percent since 1950. The disease is highly fatal, killing more women each year than breast and all gynecologic cancers combined. Today, one in every 16 women will develop lung cancer. And though the increase in its incidence is most likely due to a surge in the number of women smokers, nonsmokers aren't immune, says Michael Thun, M.D., vice president emeritus and research director of epidemiology for the American Cancer Society.

"No one's risk is zero," Emily says emphatically. "Look at me."

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The State reports: Higher cigarette tax will make S.C. more physically and fiscally fit

Most people know that smoking carries a major health impact. A recent study by the Harvard School of Public Health confirms that smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States. It is a primary cause of lung cancer, heart and vascular disease and emphysema, is associated with many digestive cancers, bladder cancer, breast cancer, reproductive disturbances, is a contributor to age-related mental decline and so on.

Most, however, do not consider that smoking also exacts a significant fiscal toll on our state.

The U.S. Center for Disease Control estimates that every pack of cigarettes sold generates $7 in smoking-related health-care costs and lost worker productivity. That cost is paid by every taxpayer, every private health insurance customer (individual and business) and by employers — regardless of whether any of them smoke or not. As such, smoking creates both physical loss in the form of damage to life and health, and fiscal loss in the form of medical treatment for smoking-related illness and lost worker productivity.

Some would consider this a hidden tax that every citizen pays to treat the deadly habit of a few.
One of the most effective ways to drive down this human and financial toll is to reduce the number of smokers by helping people choose not to smoke in the first place.

The Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids says that every 10 percent increase in the real price of cigarettes reduces overall cigarette consumption by 3 percent to 5 percent. It reduces the number of young-adult smokers by 3.5 percent and the number of kids who smoke by between 6 percent and 7 percent. Cigarette price increases also reduce the number of teenagers who start smoking. That has an important long-term effect as 90 percent of smokers say they began smoking as a teenager.

The sooner South Carolina enacts an increase in the cigarette tax, the sooner our state starts to save lives and reduce the toll. We make an investment in our physical and financial health today and tomorrow. Fewer people begin to smoke, and more smokers quit. We, our children and grandchildren enjoy healthier, longer, more productive lives. We spend less emotion and money treating illness and disease.

The S.C. Tobacco Collaborative and our partners strongly urge our legislators to consider South Carolina’s physical and fiscal health, and pass the cigarette tax increase this session. We cannot afford to wait.

Mr. Bowie is executive director of the S.C. Tobacco Collaborative, a partnership of individuals, organizations and agencies committed to reducing the toll of tobacco use in South Carolina. He is a S.C. native and resident of Chapin.

WTVD-TV Raleigh-Durham, NC reports:

The North Carolina Legislature voted to pass a broad smoking ban Wednesday.

The measure would ban lighting up in all enclosed restaurants and bars.

The final 62-56 vote came in the House where Majority Leader Hugh Holliman urged fellow House members to support the Senate version of the bill.

The Senate version bans smoking in nearly all restaurants and bars. It leaves out workplaces where children visit, which the House agreed to last month.

Holliman said the Senate version would be a good step toward protecting the public from secondhand smoke.

According to the state Division of Public Health, secondhand smoke is responsible for $289 million in state health care costs resulting from lung cancer and other diseases.

While the bill is meant to protect the public's health from second hand smoke, it provides some exceptions to private clubs, cigar bars and non-profit establishments and some feel like that is discrimination.

Opponents of the smoking ban also argue it violates the right of business owners to choose whether to allow smoking, and of their patrons.

"The bill that we have before us that we are being asked to vote on is as I've said before a terrible intrusion - a terrible governmental intrusion of personal freedom," Harnett County Rep. David Lewis said.

The bill now goes to Governor Beverly Perdue for her approval, and she has indicated she will sign it.

Read more.

The New York Times: Doctor Sounds Alarm Ahead of Tobacco Vote

For three decades, Dr. David M. Burns has written and edited some of the seminal work on tobacco science and the hazards of modern cigarettes: surgeon general’s reports, National Cancer Institute monographs, World Health Organization studies.

And he is hardly a dispassionate scientist. As a pulmonologist who has cared for hundreds of smokers who died of lung cancer, he is an unabashed campaigner against smoking.

That is why, with the Senate just weeks away from a vote on landmark legislation to regulate tobacco, Dr. Burns, 61, is now willing to sidestep the protocols of peer-reviewed science. He wants to sound one more alarm about the dangers of smoking.

Dr. Burns says he has new information, based on two years of study, indicating that cigarettes — even the supposedly safer ones — pose a much higher risk of lung cancer than before the surgeon general first declared them a health hazard in 1964.

He said the risk of a smoker’s developing lung cancer may be twice as high as it was then, even though tar and nicotine have been reduced.

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Mail Online from the UK reports: Women smokers get lung cancer earlier than men, says study

Women are more vulnerable to the deadly side effects of smoking than men, a lung cancer study found.

Research into patients with the disease found women tended to be diagnosed at a younger age than men - even though they had smoked fewer cigarettes.

They were also more likely to develop one of the most common forms of the cancer, researchers said.

It adds to the growing pile of evidence suggesting that women are more vulnerable to the cancer-causing chemicals, or carcinogens, in tobacco than men.

The study looked at 683 lung cancer patients treated at a Swiss clinic between 2000 and 2005. It found that female smokers were statistically most likely to develop adenocarcinoma - a common form of lung cancer - and were more likely to be diagnosed with the disease at an earlier age.

Study leader Dr Martin Frueh, from St Gallen Canton Hospital in Switzerland, said: 'Our findings suggest that women may have an increased susceptibility to tobacco carcinogens.'

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