Amanda: how many children start smoking every day in the UK?
How many children start smoking every day in the UK?
My daughter needs to know for her homework.
Answers and Views:
Answer by ‘Sunnyside Up’
As many as the adults allow them to have the cigaretts.
Answer by confused?
They have children in the UK? Wow! And cigarettes. Amazing! How can they afford them?
Impossible to tell. Sadly only children starting to smoke become adult smokers. Very few adults ‘start’ to smoke in adulthood, they become hooked as children. Here’s an article that may help.
Children can become hooked on tobacco within days of starting to smoke and might even be addicted from the first cigarette, according to the leader of an American study into the nicotine habits of school pupils.
The speed and small amount of tobacco required to give young people the symptoms of addiction surprised the researchers who coined a new term, juvenile onset nicotine dependence, after 30 months monitoring more than 679 pupils aged 12 and 13 when the study began.
The children were asked, over eight interviews, questions such as whether they had tried to give up smoking and failed or if they had cravings.
Among 332 young people who had ever tried tobacco, even just a puff, 40% reported signs of addiction. Among the 237 who had inhaled, 53% reported signs of addiction. Teenage girls who became hooked took only an average of three weeks from when they started to smoke occasionally. Half the boys were hooked within six months.
Scientists had previously assumed addiction did not begin until youths were smoking at least 10 cigarettes a day.
But the research – led by Joseph DiFranza, of the University of Massachusetts medical school in Worcester, America – indicated that the smoking pupils who showed signs of being hooked only had an average of two cigarettes a week.
“Some of these kids were hooked within a few days of starting to smoke,” said Dr DiFranza. “Data from human and animal studies leads me to suspect that addiction to nicotine begins, in many cases, with the first cigarette.”
His team suggested that brains of adolescents, because they were still growing, were more vulnerable to addiction. Its effect might be stronger and longer lasting than in adults.
“Youths can lose their autonomy over tobacco use – that is, they can get hooked, very quickly and at very low levels of nicotine exposure,” said Dr DiFranza. “An estimated 32% of all young smokers ultimately die prematurely as a result of their tobacco use. For some victims of tobacco, their unfortunate fates may have been cast with their first few cigarettes.”
The report of the study, the journal Tobacco Control, comes as the British government promises to crack down on tobacco advertising although it will be four years before sports such as motor racing must obey new rules. The Department of Health estimates 10% of 11- to 15-year-olds smoke at least occasionally. It also said last week that one in eight shopkeepers was turning a blind eye towards laws which ban the sale of tobacco to under-16s.
Another study, conducted in Nottinghamshire and reported in Tobacco Control, suggested that secondary school children’s smoking experiments were strongly influenced by whether they were in a tutor group where there were a lot of other adolescents who already smoked.
Danish research in the same journal indicated pupils’ smoking behaviour was influenced by whether they saw teachers smoking outdoors in the school grounds. Seeing teachers smoke indoors, for instance in staff rooms, had no effect.
Leave a Reply