Some 8,000 people have died of smoking-related heart disease in California as a result of the state's weakened anti-smoking campaign, a study found Wednesday.
Medical researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, found that anti-smoking campaigns prevented about 33,300 deaths from 1989 to 1997, but that number could have included another 8,300 people if the state's program had continued the fervor it began with in 1988.
"The state needs to start again working aggressively," said Stan Glantz, author of the study and a professor of medicine at UCSF. "In the mid-90s, the former governor was closely allied with Philip Morris ... and as a result, people died."
The initial campaign focused on older smokers, while today's program mainly targets children, Glantz said. His study found that the smoking-related deaths correlated to cutbacks in the state's 1992 campaign.
But government health administrators disagree, saying California's anti-tobacco campaign is on the mark. According to another recent study, the state's lung cancer rate has dropped 14 percent in the past decade.
Glantz emphasized his study was much different because it focused on the importance of prevention immediacy related to heart disease in adults.
"With cancer, you've got things that change very slowly. Then when you quit, it takes several years for the cancer risk to start declining," Glantz said. "A lot of effects on the heart are acute poisoning, so half the risk for a heart attack is gone in a year (after quitting smoking), and it's almost all gone in three years."
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