Smoking kills 10,000 Israelis annually
By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH : About 10,000 Israelis die each year from smoking, 8,664 actual smokers and the rest from other people's cigarette smoke, according to Dr. Gary Ginsberg and colleagues who just published an article in the European Journal of Public Health. Around 23 percent of the population over 18 smokes, and about half of all smokers eventually die of tobacco-related diseases. The former head of the Health Ministry's Center for Disease Control, Prof. Manfred Green, who is now head of the University of Haifa's School for Public Health, had previously set the estimate considerably lower. The previous official estimate of deaths among active smokers was 3,859 per year; the new calculation puts the real figure at more than twice that. Ginsburg, an expert on health statistics at the Health Ministry, Dr. Eli Rosenberg of the ministry's health promotion unit and Tel Aviv University tobacco control expert Dr. Leah Rosen concluded from their calculations t...