Medicine: Smoke Signs

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New alert for women

For years women had the consolation that cigarette smoking was somehow more hazardous to men. No longer. In a 400-page report to Congress last week, Surgeon General Julius Richmond said that women face the same dangers in smoking as men. Indeed, lung cancer deaths among women are rising so rapidly that by 1983 the smoking-related disease should overtake breast cancer as the leading cancer killer of U.S. women. The reason, says Richmond, is that so many women picked up the habit during and after World War II, a full 25 years after men did; and lung cancer often takes that long to develop.

The report also emphasized that pregnant women who smoke risk spontaneous abortion and neonatal death, and that their babies weigh an average 200 gm (7 oz.) less than those of nonsmoking mothers. And though smoking among both men and women overall has declined, young women between 17 and 24 are now outsmoking their male peers.