Ohio ranks third, Kentucky fourth and Indiana 12th in the nation for the highest rates of adult women smokers, according to a report released Tuesday by the U.S. Surgeon General.

        The high local rates mean that the Tristate is more likely than other parts of the nation to feel the effects of what Surgeon General David Satcher calls a “full-blown epidemic.”

        “When calling attention to public health problems, we must not misuse the word "epidemic.' But there is no better word to describe the 600 percent increase since 1950 in women's death rates for lung cancer, a disease caused primarily by cigarette smoking,” Dr. Satcher wrote in the report.

YOUNG WOMEN AND SMOKING

Figures are based on survey responses to a nationwide risk-behavior survey. Years differ because surveys were not conducted every year for every age group. For example, younger girls were not surveyed in 1977.    • High school seniors nationwide who said they smoked within the past month:    1977: 39.9%    1992: 25.8%    1997: 35.3%    2000: 29.7%    • 10th-grade girls who said they smoked within the past month:    1991: 20.7%    1997: 31.1%    2000: 23.6%    • Eighth-grade girls who said they smoked within the past month:    1991: 13.1%    1996: 21.1%    2000: 14.7%    Source: U.S. Surgeon General

        “Clearly, smoking-related disease among women is a full-blown epidemic.”

        Smoking is the nation's leading cause of preventable death, claiming more than 400,000 lives (male and female) a year from cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses.

        Tuesday's report states that smoking has killed nearly 3 million American women since the surgeon general last investigated female smoking in 1980, and it can cut a woman's life span by an average of 14 years.

        Meanwhile, the report states that continuing high rates of young women picking up the habit indicates that health problems linked to smoking will continue for decades to come.

        Public health officials say Tuesday's report will provide ammunition to many anti-tobacco efforts, including spending more on anti-smoking ads and prevention programs, tougher youth-smoking restrictions, increasing excise taxes in several states, even renewing efforts at the federal level to regulate tobacco like a drug.

        “It is not good news at all, but it does confirm a trend we've seen over the years,” said Dr. Malcolm Adcock, Cincinnati health commissioner.

        However, the statistics failed to impress women who were shivering outside downtown office buildings Tuesday to catch a smoke.

        “It just tells us what we already know,” said Joyce Noth, 42, of Price Hill.

        Ms. Noth said she started smoking when she was 12 because “everybody else was doing it.” She's not planning to quit.

        “Something is going to get me no matter what. I take a chance every day I walk across the street.”

        Lung cancer is the most obvious of many health risks tied to smoking.

        In 1930, the lung-cancer death rate for women was less than 5 per 100,000 and ranked seventh on a list of leading causes of cancer death.

        But starting in 1960, the death rate started climbing, according to the American Cancer Society.

        By 1970, the death rate had more than doubled. By 1980, it had doubled again. By the mid- 1980s, the death rate from lung cancer had eclipsed the death rate from breast cancer to become the nation's leading cancer killer of women.

        By 1997, the female death rate from lung cancer had reached 34 per 100,000 (compared to 24.8 per 100,000 for breast cancer deaths.)

        Now, lung cancer kills about 67,300 women a year, compared to 40,200 a year who die of breast cancer, according to the cancer society.

        Smoking also can cause cervical, oral, esophagus, pancreas, kidney and bladder cancers. It contributes to heart disease (the leading cause of death for women), chronic lung disease, early menopause, infertility, osteoporosis, miscarriages and low-birthweight babies.

        Of the few good signs noted in the report, smoking among teen-age girls appears to have declined since 1996 after many years of steady increase.
       
       The Associated Press contributed to this report.
       

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