Smoking’s US Health Toll Worse Than Estimated.

a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine “adds at least five diseases and 60,000 deaths a year to the toll taken by tobacco in the United States.” The study’s research was paid for by the American Cancer Society and performed by ACS epidemiologist Brian Carter and researchers from the US National Cancer Institute and four universities. “The smoking epidemic is still ongoing, and there is a need to evaluate how smoking is hurting us as a society, to support clinicians and policy making in public health,” Carter said. the study found 83% of smokers’ deaths were attributed to established smoking-related illnesses, but the remainder were linked to diseases including renal failure, hypertensive heart disease, breast cancer, and prostate cancer. “In nearly every case, the diseases in this second group were more likely to kill current smokers than nonsmokers, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/health/smokings-health-toll-worse-than-previously-thought-study-says.html?_r=0