Facts on Tobacco Use

• Tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of premature death, disease and disability.
• Tobacco use increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, cancers, respiratory diseases, adverse effects in pregnancy, gastrointestinal problems and tooth and gum problems.
• More than 40,000 Canadians, aged 35 or more, are estimated to die annually as a direct result of smoking (30,000 men, 16,000 women).
• Tobacco kills over 13,000 Ontario residents each year (one-fifth of all deaths in the province), or over 35 per day, compared to 3,000 annual deaths from traffic accidents, suicides, homicide and AIDS combined.
• Every year in Ontario, tobacco-related deaths costs taxpayers between $3 and $4 billion in direct health-care costs and $7 billion in indirect costs.
• Smoking is responsible for about one-third of potential years of life lost due to cancer, about one-quarter of potential years of life lost due to diseases of the heart and about one-half of potential years of life lost due to respiratory disease.
• 26 per cent of all Ontario households report that at least one person smokes inside the home every day or almost every day.
• 80 per cent of smokers who have been identified and advised to stop smoking report
  that they want to stop smoking (Brodish, 1998).
• Cigarettes and other forms of tobacco are addictive. Smoking is both a psychological and a physical addiction. Nicotine is one of the most highly addictive substances known.
• Second-hand smoke or environmental tobacco smoke is a toxic mixture of chemicals produced during the burning and smoking of tobacco products.
• There are approximately 4,000 chemical compounds in second-hand smoke. More than 40 of them are known to cause cancer.
• The average additional annual cost to an employer of employing a smoker has been estimated by the Conference Board of Canada to be $2,565 (Conference Board of Canada, 1997).

Facts about Second-Hand Smoke
Exposure to second-hand smoke causes between 1,100 and 7,800 deaths per year in Canada, at least one third of them in Ontario. Children exposed to second-hand smoke are more prone to breathing problems and lung infections.

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(Extracted from several sources; see Appendix C of the RNAO Best Practice Guideline Integrating Smoking Cessation into Daily Nursing Practice for references) Referencing this page?