This year more than 400,000 Americans will die prematurely because of tobacco use. The link between smoking and lung cancer, and now several other lung diseases and low birth weight, represents the single most unrefutable truth in public health today. Yet youth behave as if they are oblivious to the truth or invulnerable to the risks.
Smoking represents a clear example of the challenge facing everyone to enhance the public's health.
Increasing the productive and healthful years of life for every person requires a broad health promotion effort, a partnership between researchers and well-designed programs to implement the knowledge from prevention research. This challenge of translating knowledge into programs is the Arizona tobacco control challenge, and the challenge we face as public health educators. The major causes of loss of healthy years of life for Americans, in addition to tobacco use, are diet too high in calories and fats, sedentary life style and alcohol abuse. For each set of risks, we have serious gaps between the status of knowledge about what we should not do and our consistent behavior based on that knowledge. The University of Arizona Health Sciences Center has recognized the pressing need to join forces with community groups to attack these health problems.