Lots of news outlets are doing 50-year anniversary stories on the Surgeon General’s landmark report. I’m posting links to a couple of them.

This one is from RawStory (Reprinted from a French news service — thanks to Haruko for the link and there she is posting away and a bunch of people shilling ecigs– starting to see these folks all over the Internet, and am starting to wonder how many of them are paid to promote ecigs), about a 50-year anniversary report put out. Two conclusions from this report stood out for me:

1) Cigarettes are more potent than they’ve ever been.

2) And this is a big one, there’s a LOT more health risk involved in smoking than just lung cancer. The updated report specifically mentions:

…. active smoking can cause a common form of blindness called age-related macular degeneration, as well as diabetes, colorectal cancer and liver cancer.

Smoking can also cause tuberculosis, erectile dysfunction, facial clefts in infants, ectopic pregnancy, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammation, impaired immune function, and worsens the outlook for cancer patients and survivors.

Those who do not smoke but are exposed to second-hand smoke face an increased risk of stroke, said the report.

So, it’s right there in an official Surgeon General’s report: Smoking increases the risk for macular degeneration, diabetes, erectile dysfunction and arthritis (in particular, I’ve been looking into the ties between arthritis and smoking. Want to do a major post about that soon). This is important to me, because people tend to get hung up on idea that smoking causes lung cancer and that’s it. A lot of information has been coming out in the past 5 years about the connection between smoking and diabetes and arthritis.