There you go then!!! Smokers, drinkers n fatties. That rules me out on all 3 hehe.
Get rid of us all, and be left with the blonde haired, blue eyed aryan race with no drain on the Health Service..........................hmmmmmmm, now, where have we heard THAT before eh??

More scare mongering, would it read any different if the Headline read 60% of people do not get Cancer, and out of ever 40 men who smoke 9 will contact Cancer in one form or another and 6 women, and out of those how many will contract the disease from another source such as air pollution.
Once again another meaningless set of figures from The Witch Finders based on Speculation Opinion and Prattle.

So smoking causes cancer.WOW! Why the hell did'nt they tell us 20 years ago? They could have saved half a million lives by now. Not long ago the WHO carried out an extensive survey and concluded that 6,000,000 people worldwide would die of smoking this year. They then predicted that this figure would soon rise to 8,000,000 per year because of the long term damage to our organs in spite of the fact that people are quitting by the million. Strangely enough they are advising me on the very same website that if I were to quit smoking tomorrow, all my organs would, in a matter of weeks, be magically restored to those of a lifetime non-smoker. So have they now fogotten about the long term damage? Perhaps we should now afford the same amount of credibility to cancer research as we should to the WHO.

The paper by Parkin, has an interesting mistake/confusion for relative risk (RR) for older than 35
Table 1 appears to be from a different data source to Table 2 with an RR of 21.3 male and 12.5 female.
Using their data table 2 gives RR values much lower at around 7 anyway you want to calculate it, the easiest calculation (and highest RR) is 116.9/14.3 for the 44-64 male group.

So in journalistic style the two data sets are more than 200% different.
Given that 21.3 is 3 times that of 7 a flippant scientist could argue that the value of 7 could well be 3 times to big, so the relative risk could be 2.3.

I always take these studies with a pinch of salt. BUT the fact remains smoking is very bad for you, but probably not as bad as the medical properganda want you to think.

Lies, damn lies and statistics.
Looking at table 2, I can surmise that the largest cause of lung cancer is age. Notice how the figures shoot up as the age groups do.

Smoking is a terrible thing? No one should smoke?
THEN WHY THE HELL ISN'T IT ILLEGAL?
Money.

Lets look at my family -
Grandfather and mother on one side died of heart attacks - non smokers but drank moderately.
Grandfather on the other died due to illness exacerbated by an RTA.
Grandmother died of a heart attack - smoker.

Father died of meningitis the underlying cause being Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma (a blood cancer) - non smoker, healthy eater and drank moderately.
Uncle 2 years younger than his brother - smoker and at one time had issues with alcoholism, still alive 3 years later.

Mother in law still alive but had bladder cancer twice - non smoker tea total
Wife still alive cervical cancer last year - non smoker infrequent drinker and before anyone says 'passive' I have not smoked in the house for over 11 years.

Is smoking a good thing, I think it's pretty obvious that inhaling burning materials can't be good for you, but for me I'm still pretty fit, can outrun my pre-teen kids despite no regular exercise.
Until passive smoking has been proven, until smoking causes cancer (rather than smoking CAN trigger a cancer gene if you have one) has been proven. There are far more obvious health risks.
The rubbish thrown out by cars, by factories making push bikes.
How about the drunk that thumps someone or gets in a car (IMO the equivalent of going out with a weapon).

Smokers are the popular target, if the population had been nagged enough to believe that blonde hair was bad for your health, then successive governments would support actions against blondes. Not because of fact but because of votes. However, successive governments have failed to outlaw smoking completely. I would actually be tempted to vote for a party that had the balls to stand up and say they would ban it, but the money would need to be made up elsewhere.

What about ever-increasing radiation levels as a cause of cancer?
Two things I know about Japan:
1. It tops the poll for longevity
2. The Japanese smoke a lot
Now a third thing I know: there's an awful lot of radiation in the atmosphere, since last March. It's going to cause an awful lot of cancer over the next ten/twenty years. Guess what will get the blame.

Does everyone know that the statistics are compiled ignoring the possibility of anyone dying of old age? For example, my ninety-one year old mother after a very slow general decline eventually died of pneumonia, she had never smoked in her life but pneumonia is classified as a smoking related disease so officially she died from smoking!

When I first found this out I found it hard to believe. At the time (2001/2) I was was being bullied into giving up smoking because I had had a small bladder cancer removed and was still having annual check ups with a consultant. The year before he had been quite relaxed about me smoking but the then government gave consultants a cash incentive for every patient they could terrorise into giving up. So I told him about my mother expecting him to deny it, but he didn't he stopped his tirade and admitted that "statistically no one dies of old age any more."

I ended the check ups on the grounds that I had been clear for seven years and life insurance companies rate anyone who has been clear for five years as no more likely to get cancer than any one else. I've had no recurrence.

How many more very old people die from heart attacks, cancer or respiratory disease and are being lumped in with the not so old who die from these killer diseases? And how can anyone trust people who compile statistics in such a dishonest way?

bottom line: many bad habits cause cancer. Not only smoking, but also red meat, lack of fruit and veggies, etc.

Yet for some arbitrary reason, smokers are targeted and demonised.

Cheers pal. I do appreciate the witrnig.