World No Tobacco Day (WNTD) is celebrated all over the world every year 31 May. This yearly celebration aims to give awareness to the public on the threats of using tobacco, the marketing methods of tobacco businesses, what the World Health Organization (WHO) is doing to fight the tobacco pandemic, and what people around the globe can do to claim their right to health and healthy living and to protect all the future generations.
Anti-Tobacco Day, Tobacco Kills
Anti-Tobacco Day 2020: How Does Tobacco Affect Your Life and Finances?
How Does Tobacco Affect Your Life?
Tobacco is a plant widely grown for its leaves, which are dried and fermented before being put in tobacco products. Tobacco contains the ingredient nicotine, which can lead to addiction, which is why people who use tobacco facing difficulty quitting the habit. Smoked tobacco products include cigarettes, cigars, bidis, and kreteks. People often use tobacco to smoke, chew or sniff tobacco.
Smoking habit damages the small air sacs and airways of your lungs, and lung function gradually worsens as long as the person keeps smoking. Still, it develops problems, for lung disease to be diagnosed, leads to cancer, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), stroke, diabetes, and lung diseases, which include chronic bronchitis and emphysema. Smoking habits also increases the risk of certain eye problems, tuberculosis (TB), and difficulties in the immune system, including rheumatoid arthritis. In addition, this can affect your sex life and reproductive systems.
Tobacco badly affects your brain.
When a person uses tobacco, nicotine, (alkaloid, in any tobacco product, can cause cancer) quickly absorbs into the blood, which immediately releases the hormone epinephrine (adrenaline) by stimulating the adrenal glands. Epinephrine increases breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure, by stimulating the central nervous system. Studies suggest that other chemicals in tobacco smoke, especially nicotine increases levels of the chemical messenger dopamine and activates the brain's reward circuits.
Tobacco lead to cancer.
Although nicotine is addictive, other chemicals in tobacco lead you to most of the severe health consequences of tobacco, smoking can lead to chronic bronchitis, emphysema, and lung cancer. Smoking increases heart dysfunction, which can lead to stroke or heart attack. Smoking can also cause Type 2 Diabetes, pneumonia, leukemia, cataracts, and other cancers. Smokeless tobacco raises the risk of mouth cancers.
In pregnant women, smoking increases the risk of infants with low birth weight, miscarriage, stillborn or premature infants which also can cause learning and behavioral difficulties in exposed children.
People who are exposed to secondhand smoke can also lead to lung cancer and heart disease, which can cause health problems in both adults and children, such as coughing, pneumonia, bronchitis, phlegm, reduced lung function. Children are at an increased risk of ear infections when they came in contact with secondhand smoke, which may lead to severe asthma, lung infections, and even death from sudden infant death syndrome.
Tobacco is addictive.
For many who use tobacco, continued nicotine exposure changes the brain's normal behavior end in addiction. When a person tries to quit, they may have to face withdrawal symptoms, including:
- Powerful cravings for tobacco
- Problems to paying attention
- Irritability (anger)
- Increased appetite
- Trouble in sleeping
Treatment for nicotine addiction.
Both behavioral treatments and medications can be helpful to people, who want to quit smoking, but in some cases, experts suggest a combination of regular medication with counseling is more effective. The available treatments to quit smoking habit including:
- Behavioral Treatments
- Nicotine Replacement Therapies
- Other Medications
How Does Tobacco Affect Your Finances?
Tobacco smoking not only costs daily financial expenses, but it also can lead to higher expenses for high health care costs due to smoking-related diseases, health & life insurance, and exposes your loved ones to secondhand smoking, which negatively impacts their health by harmful chemicals in cigarette smoke.
More than 480,000 people in the United States die each year from sicknesses related to tobacco use. This means each year smoking causes about 1 out of 5 deaths only in the US.
Can you compare this with the global population? The World Health Organization states that Tobacco kills up to half of its users. "Tobacco kills more than 8 million people each year. More than 7 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while around 1.2 million are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke".
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in tobacco users, both men and women, one of the hardest cancers to treat, may affect your body parts include:
Stomach, Colon/Rectum, Myeloid leukemia, Pharynx (throat), esophagus (Swallowing tube), Kidney, Cervix, Mouth, Larynx (Voice box), Liver, Bladder, and Pancreas.
If you quit smoking, you're probably saving your lifetime money in many other ways, including:
- You'll have fewer chances of colds, the flu, or other respiratory infections like Chronic Respiratory Disease (CRD), which can save trips to the doctor, less money spent on medications, and fewer sick days.
- You can save money spending on dental checkups, your teeth professionally cleaned.
- You do not need to spend time or money to maintain your house, no smoke means, no discolors or bad odor inside the home.
- You can cut down on your cleaning expenses of clothes, furniture upholstery, and the interior of your car, etc.
Other lifetime benefits of quit smoking include:
- Within 2 - 5, your risk of heart attack and stroke will be reduced, which probably saves between $25,000 and $65,000.
- After 10 years, your risk of developing lung cancer will be flattened. You've also saved over $120,000.
- After 15 years, your risk of coronary heart disease and stroke will be reduced, similar to a non-smoker. You've also saved nearly $150,000.
- Quit smoking is beneficial for men and women of all ages, which improves health in general.
Remember that the rate and extent of recovery from smoking or using tobacco habits can vary from person to person.
