Did 140,000+ West Virginians die last year?

WHO says they did.

Scientists say they have pinpointed a genetic link that makes people more likely to get hooked on tobacco, causing them to smoke more cigarettes, making it harder to quit, and leading more often to deadly lung cancer.

The studies' authors disagreed on whether the set of variants directly increased the risk of lung cancer or did so indirectly by causing more smoking that led to the cancer.

The discovery by three separate teams of scientists makes the strongest case so far for the biological underpinnings of the addiction of smoking and sheds light on how genetics and cigarettes join forces to cause cancer, experts said. The findings also lay the groundwork for more tailored quit-smoking treatments.

The studies mostly looked at smokers and ex-smokers -- although two of the studies also looked at several hundred nonsmokers. The research only involved white people of European descent. People of Asian and African descent will be studied soon and may yield quite different results, scientists said. Smoking-related diseases worldwide kill about one in 10 adults, according to the World Health Organization.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,345190,00.html

WV 2006 population - 1,818,470
WV 2006 - under 18 - 21.4%

So, one in 10 adult West Wirginians would be a little more than 140,000 dead from smoking-related diseases.



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