As a result, I am increasingly infuriated by an industry that continues to deny that smoking is hazardous, especially to women. Once you have seen someone sicken and die of a smoking-related disease, you will never feel the same about cigarettes and those who make them. While cigarette packages warn smokers about certain diseases, such as lung cancer, heart disease and emphysema, they do not mention a whole host of other conditions, or those that specifically effect women. For example, smoking is a major cause of cancers of the oral cavity, tongue, larynx, esophagus, bladder, pancreas and kidney. Recently, smoking has been found to be a major contributor to breast cancer in susceptible women.
Tobacco also damages blood vessels, promoting strokes, blindness and gangrene of the legs.
At Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, one in every three patients is there because of smoking. Women's lung cancer deaths are also up because women are simply more vulnerable than men to tobacco carcinogens. For instance, post menopausal women on estrogen therapy who smoke are 32 times more likely to get lung cancer than those who don't smoke. These are present in both inhaled smoke, as well as from second-hand smoke. One element of tobacco smoke that is generally not mentioned is radioactive polonium.