Smoking costs 45,400 lives in Canada annually

There are more than 45,400 deaths in Canada attributable to smoking, and the habit cost the economy $16.2 billion in 2012, according a new study from the Conference Board of Canada.

Those costs include healthcare, tobacco enforcement, lost productivity and lost years of life attributable to smoking, with health care alone costing Canada $6.5 billion, cbc.ca wrote.

Although Canada’s smoking rate is falling, the numbers of deaths and the cost to the economy continue to rise.

“The impact of smoking is a slow burn,” said Thy Dinh, director of health economics and policy at the Conference Board.

So though the smoking rate fell by about 20 percent from 2005 to 2015, people who began smoking 30 to 50 years ago are still dying. And the big bulge of baby boomers has reached the age when a lifetime of smoking is starting to show its effects.

“That mortality is going to go down but it takes decades to see the impact of changes in behavior,” Dinh said.

In 2015, about 18 percent of the population smoked cigarettes, down from 22 percent a decade earlier.

The last study of the overall costs and mortality of smoking in Canada was 10 years ago, using figures from 2002. At that time, the number of deaths attributable to smoking was 37,209, but by 2012, the year used for the current study, mortality had risen to 45,464 across Canada. That’s 18 percent of all 2012 deaths and includes 993 deaths caused by second-hand smoke.

The most likely causes of death remained unchanged: Cancers, cardiovascular diseases and respiratory diseases. But by 2012, more health problems were seen as part of the impact of smoking because experts had confirmed the link between smoking and conditions such as macular degeneration, diabetes mellitus, tuberculosis, liver cancer and colorectal cancer

Death and illness related to smoking continued to mount over the decade even though some people may be living longer because of better cancer treatments, Dinh said. “We’re living longer, but are we living better?” she asked. More men than women were dying: 58.5 percent of all smokingrelated deaths were men.