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Excerpts from Lung cancer takes increasing toll on women: Higher rate of smoking by females after World War II is blamed by health experts
PAUL ZIELBAUER, Albany Times-Union [12/13/98]
It is a statistic health experts say is as predictable as it is alarming: Lung cancer is killing women in New York at a rate 40 percent higher than just 20 years ago, according to new data from the state Department of Health.
Between 1976 and 1995, the number of women in New York who died from lung cancer jumped from 19.8 per 100,000 to 32.4, while the disease's rate of death among men, though still roughly twice that for women, dropped slightly.
And the causes behind it are clear: the decades-old boom in the ranks of women smokers. That trend began in earnest shortly after World War II, Baptiste said, when legions of women took over jobs vacated by men -- and also took up what had been a decidedly male pastime: cigarettes.
"Tobacco is killing more women through cancer,'' Baptiste said. "It's clearly the smoking epidemic.''
Since 1955, the number of American men who smoke has steadily decreased from 52.6 percent to almost half that. But women smokers defied that steady decline, and their numbers swelled until 1965. That year, one in three women smoked regularly, according to federal statistics.
Lung cancer is still the greatest cancer killer of both sexes. It is one of four types of the disease claiming more lives of women statewide now compared to 20 years ago, an analysis of the Health Department data shows. The other growing cancer mortality rates, though dwarfed by lung cancer, stem from liver and bile duct cancer, non-Hodgkins lymphoma and multiple myeloma.
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