The cigar does not make you more elegant, girl
Many researchers are of the opinion that the gradual adoption of smoking by women is largely due to the increase in deaths from COPD. Men began smoking massively in the late nineteenth century, coinciding with the mass production of cigarettes.
In the 1920s and 1930s, tobacco companies began to target women with ads that appealed to their sense of independence and desire for social and sexual attractiveness. In the late 1960s and early 1970s another flood of advertising campaigns led a large number of women and teenagers to start smoking cigarettes. Brands such as Virginia Slims capitalized on the women's liberation movement with catchy slogans, among them "You've traveled, girl, a long road already. "Decades later, those same women who did it to be fashionable, carry a deadly disease.
Nobody suspected that all the young women who accepted the idea of smoking a cigarette because it was sophisticated, modern and liberating at a time when those who did were brand new would suffer years later a lung disease that suffocates and shortens life. Joan Cousins was one of those women of that generation.
According to Cousins, smoking was common in those years, it was fashion. She smoked her first cigarette 67 years ago, when she was 16. Until one day he began to cough and never stop, or even breathe deeply. In a hospital, doctors diagnosed a progressive condition in the lungs called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
Cousins states that not being able to breathe was so terrifying, since then he never tried another cigarette again.C OPD is a disease considered to affect men more than women, but now, in the United States, it kills more women than men. According to the American Lung Association, women represent 58 percent of the 14.7 million living in the country with this disease and 53 percent of those who die from it. Almost 8 percent of women have reported a diagnosis of COPD, compared to just under 6 percent of men. And this is the same disease suffered by the former first lady Barbara Bush, 92 years old.
A family spokesman announced that Bush had decided to begin receiving "comfortable care," a kind of care towards the end of life, which sparked a debate about what it means to stop treating a terminal illness. According to Dr. Meilan Han, associate professor of medicine at the University of Michigan, this condition is a major public health problem for women, which really does not receive enough attention, is one of the leading killers of women in the country.
Because COPD is usually associated with men, women are usually diagnosed when the disease is already advanced. Symptoms include a chronic cough, wheezing, hardening of the chest and shortness of breath. There is no cure, but its progression can be slowed down. The most important thing is that the patient, once he is diagnosed with COPD, stops smoking.