Smoking productivity losses rise, deaths ease

ATLANTA (Reuters) – Smoking deaths cost the United States
about $92 billion in lost productivity in the five years ending
in 2001, up about $10 billion from the 1995 to 1999 period,
federal health researchers said on Thursday.

At the same time, the number of U.S. smoking deaths
declined slightly, according to a report from the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention.

The report found that 438,000 premature deaths in the
United States resulted each year from smoking and exposure to
second-hand smoke from 1997 to 2001, down from about 440,000
deaths annually from 1995 to 1999.

The rise in productivity losses reflected inflation and
higher wages, said Ann Malarcher, senior scientific adviser in
the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health.

“We need further efforts to prevent youth from starting to
smoke and to encourage those who smoke to quit,” Malarcher
said.

She said states, constrained by tight budgets, had reduced
funds for tobacco-control measures such as media education
campaigns and cessation counseling for smokers.

“We have effective interventions; we just need to fully
fund those,” Malarcher said.

A CDC survey released in May found that 21.6 percent of
U.S. adults said they smoked in 2003, down from 22.5 percent in
2002 and 22.8 percent in 2001.

The CDC said the current downward trend was not moving fast
enough to reach its goal of reducing smoking rates to 12
percent by 2010.