Harmful Effects of Smoking

Smoking causes immediate lung and DNA damage that may lead to ultimate illness and death, U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin said.

New research shows that chemicals in cigarettes can damage the body “from the moment they enter your mouth” by attacking tissues as smoke actions to the lungs, Benjamin said in a report issued today. Smoking weakens the immune system’s ability to prevent injured DNA from causing cancer, she said.

Benjamin’s conclusions are the first Surgeon General’s report issued under the Obama administration. The document expands the scientific sympathetic of how tobacco smoke causes illnesses, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg and Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in an introduction.

“By learning how tobacco smoke causes disease, we learn more about how chemicals harm cells, how genes may make us at risk, and how tobacco users become addicted to nicotine,” Benjamin said in the report. The answers to these questions will help us to more in fact prevent tobacco addiction and treat tobacco-caused disease.

Decades of Research:
A 1964 Surgeon General’s report was the first official U.S. credit that smoking causes serious illnesses including cancer. Benjamin’s report is among 30 smoking-related studies issue by the office since then, according to her office’s website.
A law signed by President Barrack Obama last year gave the FDA unparalleled power to restrict the marketing of tobacco products and banned companies from adding flavors such as clove or strawberry to cigarettes. The law compulsory that the FDA create the Center for Tobacco Products and the 12-member Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee.

The advisory committee’s duties include helping the agency decide whether to ban menthol cigarettes, assessing the health special effects of dis solvable tobacco products and evaluating companies’ applications to offer new “modified-risk” tobacco products..

Reynolds based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Greensboro, North Carolina-based Lorillard are among tobacco companies looking for to overturn the parts of the 2009 law in court, such as a requirement that cigarette packages start carrying graphic warning labels in 2012. Altria, of Richmond, Virginia, is not part of the effort.