It seems that every health-related news story these days is focused on the looming influenza pandemic. The public concern level is high, and schools across the nation are closed to prevent further transmission.

I bring up this topic specifically because I don’t want to discuss swine flu or any other type of infectious disease today. The point I'd like to make is that everyone seems to be very concerned about a disease which so far hasn't appeared in our state, while seeming very unconcerned about a health threat which kills more than 6,000 Oklahomans annually: Smoking.

I know that I’ve written about smoking before in this column — last August, in fact. So why harp on the subject again so soon?

You can blame the Centers for Disease Control and their number crunchers for my return to the painful subject. The CDC has recently released state-specific smoking statistics for the period 2000 to 2004, and Oklahoma’s numbers aren’t looking too good.

If you, like 74.2 percent of the Oklahoma women out there, do not smoke, you may be already moving on to the rest of the newspaper. I ask you to bear with me, though. The risks of smoking range far beyond the individuals who light up. Smoking is a public health threat more dangerous and closer at hand than any form of influenza.

Take the inverse of the statistic above and you have 23.8 percent the percentage of Oklahoma women who smoke. We still trail the men, who smoke at the rate of 28 percent, but the real bad news is that the number is not going down.

The very bad news is that the rate of deaths caused by smoking is going up in Oklahoma-the only state in the country where deaths did not decrease since the period of 1997 to 2001. From 2000 to 2004, an average of 2462 Oklahoma women a year died as a direct result of smoking.

You may not have ever known anyone who died because of smoking, and it’s possible that you don’t even know anyone who currently smokes-not likely, but possible. How do any of these numbers impact you, then?

Let's look at some numbers with dollar signs in front of them to see how the public in general pays for smoking. Economic costs of smoking include over $600 million a year in productivity losses (time spent away from work because of smoking-related illness), and more than $1 billion a year in health care costs.

These are numbers for Oklahoma alone, so it’s you and others in our state who foot the bill for these expenses in the form of general increases in health care costs and prices.

The only good news in the CDC Oklahoma smoking report is that Oklahoma female smokers are trying to quit. More women tried to quit during the recent reporting period than had attempted it before. They all need a pat on the back, and if you know any of these women I hope you’ll provide the same.

The task of dealing with smoking as a public health issue begins with awareness. The consequences of smoking do not, as most smokers would have us believe, stop at the cigarette.

Dr. Janet Matthews is the OBGYN physician at The Women’s Center, a service of Muskogee Regional Medical Center, 687-3050. Send questions, comments or suggestions for columns to janet. matthews@capellahealth.com.