Cigarette Smoking and Health

Cigarette smoking and health is a subject that un- doubtedly represents one of the greatest current health problems, if not the greatest, facing us.Cigarette smoking probably contributes the greatest single share of causality to a diversity of lethal and disabling effects on health.However, it may be one of the most amen- able to approach in primary prevention.The achieve- ment by American epidemiologists in understanding the problem is reflected by their representing the vast majority of the 6,000 scientific contributions available at the time of the first report of the Advisory Com- mittee to the Surgeon General in 1964 and of the accumulated 30,000 scientific papers available by 1979.Dr. Lester Breslow was an early contributor to this ever-increasing epidemiologic literature on the relationship between tobacco use and health.He is an outstanding exponent of the goal of epidemiologythe primary prevention of disease.Dr. Breslow is