U.S. medical experts have released a 675-page report that points out the growing threat of cigarettes to women’s health and lives in modern life. The numbers revealed in the report are alarming: 400,000 people die each year from smoking-related illnesses across the United States, of which women already account for 39 percent, more than double the number in 1965. Even more serious is the fact that many teenage women are involved in the ranks of smokers. This report is a wake-up call for people who have been failing to address this issue – worldwide, one woman dies from smoking every 3 1/2 seconds.
1. The numbers are alarming
For a long time, it was widely believed that smoking was a male preserve and that the number of women who smoked and died as a result was much lower than that of men. In fact, today the situation is far from simple. Each year, 165,000 women in the United States die from smoking-related causes, and since 1980, 3 million women have died from smoking-related illnesses or fires, living 14 years less than their normal life expectancy.
In 2000, 67,600 women died of lung cancer and 40,800 died of breast cancer, a difference of more than 27,000. Since 1950 to today, the number of women dying from lung cancer has increased by more than 600 percent. One in five women in the United States smokes. Worldwide, one woman dies from smoking every 3½ seconds. To make matters worse, more young women, those between the ages of 10 and 20, are smoking 30 percent more than they did 10 years ago. In the United States, 29. 7% of high school girls are involved with cigarettes.
2, unpredictable consequences
Cigarettes have become the biggest killer of contemporary women’s health and life. It is well known that smoking weakens the immune system and predisposes the body to a variety of diseases, including eight types of cancer, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, and various degrees of lung disease. For women, the harm caused by smoking is much more serious than for men. In addition to the above-mentioned diseases that male smokers may suffer, women face more serious health risks due to their special physiological conditions.
Such as irregular menstruation, early menopause that accelerates aging, infertility, osteoporosis, arthritis, uterine cancer, etc. If a woman smokes during pregnancy, the consequences will be unpredictable – easy to stillbirth, miscarriage, newborns are weak, sudden death of newborns and other serious consequences. Inhaling large amounts of secondhand smoke in public places also makes children and women vulnerable to asthma and other diseases.
For such staggering numbers, many women do not recognize the seriousness of the situation. Thompson, the Bush administration’s health secretary, was worried about this. Following the release of the report, Thompson said he would work hard to get Congress to pass a regulation on resisting smoking by women.
Thompson deplored the fact that, unwittingly, the American people are “losing our mothers, grandmothers, sisters and wives because they smoke. This addiction affects our families, our careers, our economy, our country.” The ubiquitous smoky atmosphere is a death sentence for women, he said. And according to valid statistics, women who are relatively poorer and less educated are an even bigger part of the smokers.
Among women, those with only 9 to 11 years of education are three times more likely to smoke than other women, accounting for 32. 9 percent, compared to 11. 2 percent of female smokers who have completed four years of college.
3, how to cope
Quitting smoking can certainly make women significantly less likely to suffer from a variety of diseases. In this report, experts cite effective measures taken by some U.S. states to curb smoking, and encourage other states to follow suit.
In California, high tobacco taxes and intensive education on the topic in school curricula have reduced the rate of lung cancer in women caused by cigarettes by 5 percent over the past 10 years, while elsewhere the figure has increased by 13 percent.
In Massachusetts, there are eye-catching billboards everywhere with a photo of an actual smoker with the bold warning text, “Larin died at 31 from smoking. What do you expect?”
Florida’s campaign against teen smoking has reduced the rate of smoking among girls in the state’s high schools from 18. 1 percent in 1998 to 10. 9 percent last year.
In fact, the number of male smokers in the United States is still much higher than the number of females, but it is impossible to ignore that the gap is being bridged: in 1940, the ratio of female to male smokers was 22%:26%, in 1965 it reached 34%:52%, while in 1924 only 6% of women smoked. In this growing cohort of smokers, young smokers have come to dominate and the gender gap has been narrowed to invisibility, and if the warnings about smoking in the 1980s were just a reminder to women, today it is a serious and definite social problem. Modern women are “smoking like men and dying like men”.
Health expert David believes that the growing tobacco industry is an important countervailing factor to the ever-popular anti-smoking movement. In the wave of worldwide calls to quit smoking, the tobacco industry is making dramatic leaps and bounds over the same period, reaching a record $8.2 billion in 1999, or $1 million per hour, and the tobacco industry spends $8 billion annually on advertising, targeting mainly female consumers.
Without major initiatives, the goal of halving the number of female smokers by 2010 is a pipe dream. And a plethora of cigarette ads of all shapes and sizes are tempting the girls, including one that reads, “Until I find a real man, I’ll keep smoking real cigarettes.”
The report was released to urge the U.S. Congress to implement effective and immediate means to keep women away from this vice and to advocate for agencies to spend some of their funds on treatment for some needy women. Because of the important role of women in society, the role of women’s health on the development of society as a whole and the physical fitness of the people cannot be ignored. How to make the majority of women away from cigarettes, so that the diseases associated with it no longer plague women, it is necessary to work together from all sides.
Women smoking is more harmful women smoking does not represent the needs of modern society, nor does it improve their status and dignity. On the contrary, it also brings physical damage to the body. According to medical experts, smoking is harmful to women: affects beauty: the skin of women who smoke looks older than women who do not smoke, with more wrinkles and a grayish color. Especially at the corners of the eyes, the upper and lower lips and the corners of the mouth wrinkles increased significantly.
(1) Vulnerability to AIDS: The main manifestation is the effect of smoking on the immune system. Smoking can cause a significant reduction in activated immune cells CD4 and lymphocytes. Smoking can affect the vagina, cervix and immune system, making the immunity decreased. Therefore, under the same circumstances, smokers are more likely to develop AIDS than nonsmokers.
(2) Reduced fertility: women who smoke are prone to female infertility, with an infertility rate of 10-30%. Easy to cause miscarriage: smoking more than 10 support per day pregnant women, their miscarriage rate is more than twice as high than non-smoking pregnant women; smoking women preterm birth rate is twice as high as non-smoking women. According to recent studies, the more pregnant women smoke, the greater the likelihood that their children will be arrested for violent crimes in the future.
(3) The rate of deformities in babies delivered is significantly higher: 2-3 times that of non-smoking women, with 73% of them suffering from congenital heart disease and double the risk of leukemia. In addition, the incidence of anencephaly and dementia is significantly higher. Among the children born to women who smoke, the rate of mental retardation and mental illness is also significant.
(4) Reduce breast milk secretion: smoking can reduce breast milk secretion, nicotine can also enter the breast milk with the blood. Women who smoke 10-20 cigarettes a day can separate 0,4-0,5 mg of nicotine in 1 kg of breast milk. This is a serious threat to the health of infants.
(5) susceptible to cancer: smoking women have a 40% higher risk of breast cancer than non-smoking women, 14 times higher risk of cervical cancer than non-smoking women, and 28 times higher risk of ovarian cancer.
(6) susceptible to stroke: women who smoke 1-4 cigarettes a day are more than 1 times more likely to have a stroke than non-smoking women. Those who smoke more than 5 cigarettes are more than 5 times more likely to have a stroke.