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Despite these alarming statistics, the scale ofthe threat that smoking causes to womens healthhas received surprisingly little attention. Smoking isstill seen by many as a mainly male problem, perhapsbecause men were the first to take up the habit andtherefore the first to suffer the ill-effects. This is nolonger the case. Women who smoke like men will dielike men. WHO estimates that, in industrializedcountries, smoking rates amongst men and women are very similar, at around 30 per cent; in alarge number of developed countries, smoking is now more common among teenage girls thanboys. As women took up smoking later than men, the full impact of smoking on their health hasyet to be seen. But it is clear from countries where women have smoked longest, such as theUnited Kingdom and the United States, that smoking causes the same diseases in women as inmen and the gap between their death rates is narrowing. On current trends, some 20 to 25per cent of women who smoke will die from their habit. One in three of these deaths will beamong women under 65 year of age. The US Surgeon General has estimated that, amongstthese women, smoking is responsible for around 40 per cent heart disease deaths, 55 per centof lethal strokes and, among women of all ages, 80 per cent of lung cancer deaths and 30 percent of all cancer deaths. Over the last 20 years, death rates in women from lung cancer havemore than doubled in Japan, Norway, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom; have increasedby more than 200 per cent in Australia, Denmark and New Zealand; and have increased by morethan 300 per cent in Canada and the United States. | 
