Scientific studies have confirmed that every cigarette smoked reduces life expectancy by 5 minutes and 50 seconds, and a pack of cigarettes smoked every day reduces life expectancy by 5.5 years, while two packs of cigarettes smoked every day reduces life expectancy by 8.3 years. If smoking is not controlled from now on, by 2025, the number of deaths due to smoking in China will rise from the current 100,000 per year to 2 million.
The estimate is based on a man who started smoking at the age of seventeen and died at the average age of seventy-one. Assuming that he smoked fifteen cigarettes a day, as does the average British addict, he would have consumed three hundred and eleven thousand, six hundred and eighty-eight cigarettes in his lifetime. The average smoker would die six and a half years earlier than the non-smoker. A similar study done several decades ago concluded that each cigarette consumed reduces a person's life expectancy by five minutes. Since then, however, the harm of cigarettes to life expectancy has increased as it has become clear that non-smokers live longer. About a third of people in the UK currently smoke, and about 120,000 people a year die from smoking-related illnesses, two-thirds of which are cancer and heart disease. The researchers hope the new study will encourage more people to take the plunge and quit smoking at the dawn of the new century. The figures show that if a person smokes 20 cigarettes a day, he loses one day of life for every week he smokes; and as if that weren't bad enough, he warns, smoking can also lead to an agonizingly painful death or more bedridden illnesses. Tar is a mixture of several substances that condenses into a sticky substance in the lungs. Nicotine is an addictive drug that is absorbed by the lungs and acts primarily on the nervous system. Carbon monoxide reduces the ability of red blood cells to transport oxygen throughout the body. A person who smokes 15 to 20 cigarettes a day is 14 times more likely to die of lung, oral or throat cancer than a non-smoker; four times more likely to die of esophageal cancer than a non-smoker; twice as likely to die of bladder cancer; and twice as likely to die of heart disease. Cigarette smoking is the main cause of chronic bronchitis and emphysema, and chronic lung disease itself, also increases the risk of pneumonia and heart disease, and smoking also increases the risk of high blood pressure.