If people didn't smoke 'lung cancer would be rare'

If people did not smoke then lung cancer would not be nearly as prevalent as it is today, one medical expert has asserted.

According to Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), a campaigning public health charity that works to eliminate the harm caused by tobacco, made the claim, explaining that the government needs to implement more tobacco-controlled measures to limit the disease.

The organisation's comments follow its lung cancer incidence projections to 2024, made in a report entitled 'Future rates and numbers of new cases in Great Britain and the UK (February 2009)'.

The report found that the lung cancer incidence rate is set to continue falling, as between 1975 and 2024 the lung cancer rate is projected to drop by more than one-third.

However, the female lung cancer age-standardised incidence rate is expected to increase from 24.8 to 32.5 per 100,000 females between 1975 and 2024.

The research also found that smoking is responsible for around 90 per cent of lung cancer cases. However, the time lag between smoking and the onset of lung cancer means that experts expect that it will continue to be a major issue for health services for the foreseeable future, as people live in a 'it won't happen to me' mentality.

Amanda Sandford, research manager at ASH, called the research's revelations "interesting".

She added: "What they are showing is that the overall rate will decline as a result of the strong tobacco controlled measures we've had in place in recent years, particularly the advertising ban and the smoking ban in public places because that has led to a reduction in the number of people who smoke.

“There is a clear correlation between smoking rates and lung cancer.

"Quite simply, if people do not smoke, lung cancer would be a rare disease. We know how to reduce lung cancer rates so it's quite simple, get people to stop smoking or possibly never to start."

Another report entitled ‘Beyond Smoking Kills', published by ASH in collaboration with the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, found that the cost of smoking to the NHS would have risen even more - to more than £3 billion a year - if government action, health education and changing social attitudes had not led over the last decade to a fall in the total number of smokers from nearly 12 million to just over nine million.

Ms Sandford concluded: "Because of the advances for treatment for cancer, it means people are living longer with the disease and with an aging population there will actually be more cases of lung cancer in future.

"So in order to ensure that those numbers don’t go up too dramatically we can't relax in terms of the tobacco controlled measures. We need to keep putting pressure on the government to have even more measures in place to make sure that we can do all that we possibly can to bring the smoking rates down."