Tobacco use : more needs to be done to control active and passive smoking

• Author(s): Rocha, Evangelista
• Date: 2020
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/43501
• Origin: Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa
• Document Type: Journal article
• Language: English
• Contributor(s): Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto da ULisboa

Description

There was a time when tobacco was thought to have medicinal qualities and another time when tobacco consumption was common, fashionable, and ubiquitous, and considered socially acceptable. However, statistical evidence suggesting a relationship between smoking and lung cancer began to emerge in the late 1920s, although scientific evidence of a causal relationship was not available until the mid-twentieth century. Since then, epidemiologists have collected evidence in large prospective and case-control studies to support a causal relationship between smoking and various diseases, chiefly cancer and cardiovascular and chronic respiratory diseases. As evidence on the negative effects of tobacco use accumulated, numerous organizations produced technical reports with programs and strategies for tobacco control that changed the course of public health. However, despite some success in implementing evidence-based policies and programs that have decreased smoking rates in recent decades, more effective strategies are needed to end the tobacco epidemic.