Keep It Sacred

The Surgeon General of the United States, working with a team of leading experts on smoking and health, released a new report in 2004.

After reviewing scientific evidence, researchers reached these important conclusions:

 - Smoking harms nearly every organ of your body. It causes diseases and worsens your health.
- Quitting smoking has many benefits. It lowers your risk for diseases and death caused by smoking and improves your health.
- Low-tar and low-nicotine cigarettes are not safer to smoke.
- The list of diseases that we know are caused by smoking has grown even longer. The list now includes cancers of the cervix, pancreas, kidneys, and stomach, aortic aneurysms, leukemia, cataracts, pneumonia, and gum disease.

The 2004 Surgeon General’s report has new information about how smoking harms your health. A new database of more than 1,600 articles cited in this report is available on the Internet. By going to the CDC Web site at www.cdc.gov/tobacco you can search many of the studies cited in this report. Topics include cancer, cardiovascular diseases, respiratory diseases, reproductive effects, and other harmful health effects.

PDF file: The Health Consequences of Smoking: What It Means to You

There’s Never Been a Better Time to Quit!

Protect our Future Cigarette smoking during pregnancy can cause serious health problems for both mother and child, such as pregnancy complications, premature birth, low-birth-weight infants, still birth and infant death.

Mothers who smoke can pass nicotine to their children through breast milk. Cigarette smoking not only passes nicotine on to the fetus; it also prevents as much as 25 percent of oxygen from reaching the placenta. Smoking during pregnancy accounts for 20 to 30 percent of low-birth weight babies, up to 14 percent of preterm deliveries and about 10 percent of all infant deaths.

Additionally, infants are more likely to develop colds, bronchitis, and other respiratory diseases if secondhand smoke is present in the home or day care center. Maternal smoking has also been liked to asthma among infants and young children. The odds ofdevelopingasthma are twice as high among children whose mothers smoke more than 10 cigarettes a day.

1-800-LUNG-USA & www.ocaithb.org & www.lungusa.org

PDF file: Smoking and Pregnancy