However, the CDC says those who are uninsured or on Medicaid have smoking rates double that of those with private health insurance or Medicare. While the average number of cigarettes smokers lit up daily was 17 in 2005, that number has now dropped to about 14 a day.
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“Smokers feel slim cigarettes are less “fulfilling” so they use other tobacco products, smoke more of them or simply take more drags”, she said.
Those with only a high-school degree and non-whites also were far more likely to smoke than better-educated adults and/or whites, the researchers found.
“There’s a lot of encouraging news in these most recent national smoking estimates”, said lead investigator Brian King, deputy director for research translation at the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health in Atlanta. They released this information Thursday as part of their Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report for Friday, November 13th.
The survey showed that when education level rises, smoking levels fall. The goal of the public health community, codified in Healthy People 2020, is to reduce that rate to 12 percent or less by that date, and now it is 16.8 percent.
Wu Yiqun, executive vice director of ThinkTank, a Beijing-based NGO committed to tobacco control, said the hazards of slim cigarettes have been greatly underplayed in China.
Smoking disparities in different segments of the population are not yet a thing of the past, however. Unfortunately, though, officials said that people covered by the government’s Medicaid health insurance program for low-income individuals, and those without any kind of health insurance are much more likely to smoke than people who have solid health insurance programs. However, that is also the group that’s using more E-cigarettes and smoking hookah. “I thought there was no way we would make it there …”
Dr. Gregg Fonarow, a spokesman for the American Heart Association and a professor of cardiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, welcomed the findings but expressed a few reservations. Cigarette smoking does seem to have fallen among young adults, with those in the 18 to 24 age range showing a sharp decline.
Smoking has been one of the brightest public health successes of recent history.
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Nevertheless, cautioned Fonarow, “millions of men and women still smoke in the USA, putting their lives at risk. More work is needed to address this, particularly among vulnerable populations who disproportionately continue to smoke”.
