The CDC has released new numbers showing the smoking rate is steadily declining. From 2014 to 2015 the rate fell by 2%, which NBC News notes is the largest one-year decline in more than 20 years.
The last time there was a drop nearly as big was from 1992 to 1993, when the smoking rate fell 1.5 percentage points, according to Brian King of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics reported the new statistic Tuesday. It’s based on a large national survey that is the government’s primary measuring stick for many health-related trends.
The CDC estimates that more than 480,000 preventable illnesses are caused by smoking.
Around 42% of all adults smoked 50 years ago and NBC explains the decline coincided with smoking bans, taxes on cigarettes and increased awareness of the health problems associated with smoking. They also mention the growth of the e-cigarette industry; e-cigarettes are “potentially useful tools to help smokers quit, but experts fear it also creates a new way for people to get addicted to nicotine.”
However, NBC warns that “CDC surveys have shown a boom in e-cigarette use among teenagers, and health officials fear many of those kids will get hooked on nicotine and later become smokers. ” Of course there’s not a shred of evidence for that claim even though the government is in the process of destroying the e-cig industry with outrageous regulations.
“We may see 18-, 19- and 20-year olds pick up the habit,” quacked Dr. Jonathan Whiteson, a smoking-cessation specialist at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York. We MAY see this habit pick up even though smoking continues to decline? E-cigs have been around since 2004 and count several million users as of 2013. Where’s the increase?
CDC’s Brian King: “We’d expect continued declines in smoking, as we’ve seen in the past 50 years. But it’s hard to say what future holds.”
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