State’s Smoking-Related Death Rate Is Below Average

The rate of smoking-related deaths in California is less than the national average, federal health officials reported Thursday, saying that “innovative” anti-smoking measures in the state “are making great strides in decreasing the problem.”

In the government’s first state-by-state breakdown of smoking-associated deaths, California had 109.5 deaths per 100,000 people in 1985, the last year for which statistics were available, lower than the national average of 130.

“Many communities in the state have passed . . . indoor (anti-smoking) ordinances, which have contributed to the lower prevalence of smoking,” said Dr. Thomas Novotny, a medical epidemiologist with the Office of Smoking and Health, part of the federal Centers for Disease Control, which released the study. “Also, I think the recently passed 25-cent tax increase on cigarettes will go a long way toward discouraging smoking among young people.”

The report listed Kentucky as having the highest rate, with 175.9 deaths per 100,000 population, and Utah with the lowest, with 45.3.

California, the state with the largest population in the nation, led the country overall in total smoking-related deaths, with 28,533, including 236 in children, the report said. New York was second, with 26,880. Alaska, which had a rate of 54.3, had the lowest overall total, with 271 deaths, according to the study. Utah, with the lowest rate, had a total of 742 smoking-related deaths, and Kentucky, with the highest rate, had 6,497, the study said.

“There is a clear separation between the East and the West,” Novotny said. “Smoking is much more common east of the Mississippi. The climate is certainly more anti-smoking and pro-health in California than in a lot of other places.”

The study estimated that, in California, smoking contributed to 79,491 years of potential life lost before age 65 and to 331,415 years of potential life lost based on life-expectancy projections.

The report--the preliminary results of a study the agency must prepare for Congress every two years on the status of smoking and smoking-related diseases--looked at 21 different smoking-linked causes of death in adults and four in children.

The adult causes included heart disease, lung and other cancers and other serious respiratory ailments, such as emphysema. In children, the study examined data related to premature birth--which can be caused by smoking by pregnant women--and its resulting conditions, which include low birth weight and respiratory distress syndrome in newborns.

The report said that 67% of the smoking-related deaths in the United States were among men, 32% among women and less than 1% were among children younger than 5.

“We don’t expect to see any trends in terms of a decline in deaths for quite some time because of the long latency period between smoking” and its resulting illness, Novotny said. “It will be decades before we see a substantial decline in the numbers of deaths.”

The prevalence of smoking “is definitely going down everywhere,” Novotny said. However, he added that “it is declining less rapidly in women.” More women than men are expected to be smoking “sometime in the 1990s,” he said.