The 795 Thousand and Ending a Century of Tobacco
Source: Oxford Journals Tonight, a grandfather will read his grandson a soothing bedtime story. Yesterday, a mother saw her son perform a brilliant violin solo. Tomorrow, a grandfather will see his granddaughter complete the first unassisted triple play in their community's t-ball league history. What do these vignettes have in common? They represent just three of the 795 851 people––the 795 thousand––whose premature deaths from lung cancer were averted in the United States through aggressive tobacco control policies and interventions between 1975 and 2000, as determined by a series of consortium-based sophisticated modeling techniques and reported by Moolgavkar et al. (1) in this issue of the Journal. Sometimes, we become inured to the sheer number of deaths caused by tobacco—for example, a predicted 1 billion tobacco-caused deaths this century, 100 million people killed by tobacco in the 20th century, 6 million deaths per year globally, 443 000 deaths per year in the United States, etc. But, despite these enormous, and even numbing, numbers, we need to remember that every one of these 1 billion, 100 million, 6 million, or 443 000, was a father, mother, brother, sister, son, or daughter who, if tobacco had not intervened, would have enjoyed, and shared, a longer, healthier, and more fulfilling life. How did this happen? How did we allow tobacco, over the past 100 years, to kill and cause disease with such abandon? And, more important, how have we begun to turn the tide against the tobacco tsunami and how can we continue to learn from [...]