Tobacco smoke causes immediate damage: report

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Cigarette smoke causes immediate damage to the lungs and to DNA, and President Barack Obama's administration will make smoking-cessation efforts a priority, federal health officials said on Thursday.

Smoking hurts not only the smokers, but people around them, and taxes, bans and treatment all must be used together to help get smoking rates down, Surgeon-General Dr. Regina Benjamin said in a report on smoking.

"The chemicals in tobacco smoke reach your lungs quickly every time you inhale causing damage immediately," Benjamin said in a statement.

"Inhaling even the smallest amount of tobacco smoke can also damage your DNA, which can lead to cancer."

The report also says tobacco companies have deliberately designed cigarettes and other tobacco products to be addictive and that they have released new tobacco products that are allegedly safer but that are in fact just as dangerous and addictive.

Benjamin said a third of people who ever try cigarettes become daily smokers.

"Over the last two years we have stepped up efforts to reduce tobacco use, including implementing legislation to regulate tobacco products, investing in local tobacco control efforts and expanding access to insurance coverage for tobacco cessation," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement.

"This will remain a key priority of this administration."

The report notes that studies have shown cigarettes kill 443,000 people every year in the United States - one in every five people who die - from cancer, heart disease, lung disease and other causes.

"The economic burden of cigarette use includes more than $193 billion annually in health care costs and loss of productivity," Sebelius said.

"More than 1,000 people are killed every day by cigarettes and one half of all long-term smokers are killed by smoking-related diseases," the report adds.

Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Dr. Margaret Hamburg, Food and Drug Administration commissioner, said research also shows how to reduce smoking.

"The largest impacts come when we increase tobacco prices, ban smoking in public places, offer affordable and accessible cessation treatments and combine media campaigns and other initiatives," they wrote in an introduction to the report.

The CDC estimates that around 23 percent of adults smoke and 17 percent of high school students do.

SOURCE: http://link.reuters.com/cej49q Office of the Surgeon General, December 9, 2010.