Smoking rates

Great news was shared today on your opinion page related to drops in cancer rates in the U.S. and worldwide. The article mentioned a myriad of reasons for the reduction starting with the fact that fewer residents in the U.S. are smoking which has reduced the incidence of lung cancer, in particular.

This trend seems to have taken hold everywhere except the Antelope Valley. Stubbornly, we continue to have the highest rates of deaths for not only lung cancer but also other tobacco-related diseases like emphysema, COPD, hypertension and coronary heart disease.

This is probably because we have the highest adult smoking rates in the county at 18.2% while the county norm is 13.3%. We have twice the county norm for percent of children ages 0 to 17 with current asthma and it should be noted that a contributing factor may be that we have twice the number of households with children ages 0-17 regularly exposed to tobacco smoke at home.

For 20 years, since the

Tobacco Settlement Agreement, the state took on an effort to educate the public which helped reduce the adult smoking rate from 21% to 11%. Since this effort was statewide, no one can deny that the information was received by residents of the AV.

So why does the AV continue to have such high smoking rates and continue to die of related diseases at a higher rate than the rest of the county and the state?

Pueblo y Salud and the Prevention Community Council have postulated for twenty years that the concentration of tobacco outlets has everything to do with this problem. Until we substantially reduce the number of tobacco outlets in Lancaster — 144 and Palmdale — 79, we will continue to experience severe health disparities.

Xavier Flores Program director Pueblo y Salud Palmdale