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Opinion Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu
THE anti-smoking campaign is on once more, this time with the renowned no nonsense Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) church being an active part of the worldwide project.Many people seem to be unaware of the danger posed by smoking especially of cigarettes to human life. Most of those who think that smoking is a source of pleasure are young people to whom smoking also gives a very false sense of social prestige and/or importance. One of the reasons some people smoke is that they are utterly ignorant about how it harms their bodies, and by how many years on average it shortens their lives.

The relationship between cigarette smoking and the smokers’ length of life was accidentally discovered by Dr Raymond Pearl of the department of biology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health in the United States in 1938.

He had been conducting some research on human life with particular reference to its longevity and tobacco smoking. He published a series of articles titled Tobacco Smoking and Longevity.

One of those articles appeared in a journal called Science on March 4, 1938, and in it Dr Pearl said he had most carefully recorded the life styles of 6,813 men, 1,905 of whom were heavy smokers, 2,814 moderate smokers and 2,094 non smokers.

He discovered that at the age of 30 years, the death rate of the heavy smokers was twice as high as that of non-smokers.

That of moderate smokers was just about the same as that of non-smokers. At that same age, the life expectancy of the heavy smokers was twenty-seven and half years, that of the moderate smokers was 36 years, and that of the non-smokers was 38 years.

What these statistics indicate is that the heavy smokers would live for an average of 57 years 6 months, the moderate smokers 66 years, and the non-smokers for some 68 years, a good 100 years and six months longer than the heavy smokers.

This article’s author doe not think that it is normal for anybody to develop a habit that would reduce their life’s length by approximately 11 years.

It is important to point out that Dr Pearl’s study was followed by several more or less similar projects. They include one by Drs Hammond and Horn whose results were published in 1958, that is some 20 years after Dr Pearl’s pioneering work in that field.

The two doctors began with 187,783 men aged between 50 and 69 years. Those people were in obviously good health when the research project, which lasted for 44 months, was launched.

However, during that period, 11,870 of those men died and the causes of their deaths were properly established. The study showed that the death rate among the smokers increased progressively with the number of cigarettes smoked.

It indicated that smokers who finished about 20 cigarettes daily had a death rate of 2.23 times as great as non-smokers.

In Britain, the Royal College of Physicians published a book titled Smoking and Health in 1962. The Book deals with scientific data on smoking in relation to lung cancer and other ailments.

The physicians state in that book that the chance of a person dying in the next 10 years if he is a heavy cigarette smoker, and is about 35 years old is one in 23 but that of a non-smoker of the same age is one in 90.

It goes on to say 33 percent (one in three) of heavy smokers would die before they reached the age of 65, but that only 15 percent (one in six) of people of the same age who were non-smokers would die before that age.

Incidentally, we must mention the evidence presented to the 1954 American Medical Association’s annual meeting by several delegates proving that lung cancer may be caused by cigarette smoking.

In 1964, a book published by the Advisory Committee to the  Surgeon General of the Public Health Department of the United States has this to say on this matter: “The mortality ration for male cigarette smokers compared with non-smokers, for all causes of death taken together, is 1:68, representing a total death rate nearly 70 percent high than for non-smokers.”

That smoking is harmful to people’s health is certainly irrefutable. People who smoke are susceptible to coronary heart disease much more than non-smokers. The more one smokes, the greater the risk of suffering from a coronary heart problem.

Smoking has also been proven to have a causative effect on what medical doctors call chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Two such diseases are chronic bronchitis and emphysema. A COPD is not curable and because of that, doctors focus a great deal on preventive measures. Since smoking is one of its causes, it is most advisable not to smoke at all, or if the disease develops after one has already got into the smoking habit, one should stop immediately after a COPD has been diagonised.

The usual first evidence of a COPD is the development of what is generally referred to as a ‘smoker’s cough,’ a persistent, productive cough. That cough is characterized by the production of mucus that contains pus.

Seeing a doctor urgently is most advisable so is stopping smoking. It is a very good thing that many churches strictly prohibit their members from smoking. These include the SDA, the Brethren-In-Christ Church, all born again Pentecostals and, of course, Guta RaMwari whose members’ businesses do not sell any tobacco or alcoholic beverages.

Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu is a retired Bulawayo-based journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0734328136 or through [email protected] <mailto:[email protected].