Lung Cancer and Bronchitis in Relation to Cigarette Smoking and Fuel Consumption in Twenty Countries

cigarette smoking was a cause of lung cancer but that smoking was not the only cause of this disease. The report on the same subject by the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee of the United States Public Health Service (1964) concluded that: "Cigarette smoking is causally related to lung cancer in men; the magnitude of the effect of cigar-ette smoking far outweighs all other factors". The phrase "far outweighs " has been wrongly taken by some to imply that the other factors are of little consequence in their total effect but, when dealing with a disease responsible for some 30,000 deaths a year in the United Kingdom, a fraction of only one-fifth due to other factors would account for 6,000 deaths and such a number could hardly be