Smoking impairs, kills and costs

“The personal price of tobacco harm to families and children is shocking and the costs to local communities of prolonged illness, loss of income and work days, amount to many billions of pounds a year. Smoking is still the number one cause of preventable death in the UK and its impacts hit the poorest the hardest. We can make smoking history for children – but only if together we accelerate the work which has begun” Julie Webster, Chair, Tobacco Free Futures

• one in every two life long smokers is killed by tobacco
• more than 80,000 people in England died prematurely from a smoking related disease in 2009
• It is children and young people who start to smoke; every year sees 200,000 new smokers – the majority of these, 90%, are under 19
• Smoking kills around 13,000 a year in the North West (35 people a day)
• one in four children aged 14 to 15 regularly get offered illegal tobacco
• some 33,000 children in the North West suffer daily for the effects of secondhand smoke including bronchitis, wheezing, asthma attacks and glue ear, with 1,000 hospital admissions each year
• smoking increases infant mortality rates by 40%
• smoking rates are much higher in lower income families and poor people have higher nicotine addiction
• smoking is the single biggest cause of inequalities in death rates between the richest and poorest in our communities
• the number of smokers has fallen by 4% since 2009, with the largest decreases in females (-6%) and 14 year olds (-9%)