Morbidity and Mortality Related to Tobacco Use

Morbidity and Mortality Related to Tobacco Use

  * Worldwide, tobacco use causes more than 5 million deaths per year.1
  * Current trends show that tobacco use will cause more than 8 million deaths annually by 2030.1
  * Cigarette smoking is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States.2
  * In the United States, cigarette smoking is responsible for about one in five deaths annually, or about 443,000 deaths per year.3
  * An estimated 49,000 of these deaths are the result of secondhand smoke exposure.3
  * On average, smokers die 13 to 14 years earlier than nonsmokers.2
  * For every person who dies of a smoking-related disease, 20 more people suffer with at least one serious illness from smoking.4
  * Cigarette smoking increases the length of time that people live with a disability by about 2 years.5

Tobacco-Related Costs and Expenditure in the United States

  * Annually, cigarette smoking costs more than $193 billion ($97 billion in lost productivity and $96 billion in health care expenditures).3
  * Health care costs associated with exposure to secondhand smoke average $10 billion annually.6
  * In 2005, the latest year with available data, the cigarette industry spent almost $13.4 billion, or more than $36 million per day, on advertising and promotional expenses.7
  * States spend less than 3% of the $24.9 billion available to them from tobacco excise taxes and tobacco industry legal settlements on preventing and controlling tobacco use.8 Investing only 17% of these funds would allow every state tobacco control program to be funded at CDC-recommended minimum levels.9

Tobacco Use in the United States

  * Approximately 19.8% of U.S. adults (43.4 million people) are current cigarette smokers.10
  * Prevalence of cigarette smoking is highest among American Indians/Alaska Natives (36.4%), followed by African Americans (19.8%), whites (21.4%), Hispanics (13.3%), and Asians [excluding Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders](9.6%).10
  * In the United States, 20% of high school students are current cigarette smokers.11
  * Each day, about 1,100 persons younger than 18 years of age become regular smokers; that is, they begin smoking on a daily basis.12
  * Among adult smokers, 70% report that they want to quit completely,13 and more than 40% try to quit each year.

Cited from CDC.gov