HEALTH WARNING
We are no longer updating our Covid-19 hub regularly. That includes this page. Follow the link below for the latest.
HEALTH WARNING
We are no longer updating our Covid-19 hub regularly. That includes this page. Click here for the latest.
Male smokers: Quit for Covid
03/04/20 .
News
If you want to quit smoking, there's no time like the present.
Yes, people say that all the time but this time it is truer than ever. Research from China shows that men who smoke who contract Covid-19 are 14 times more likely to develop the serious forms of the disease.
Fourteen times. That is a massive difference and it's because both tobacco and Covid-19 attack the respiratory system. Two other factors for male smokers to bear in mind:
- Men appear more likely both to catch and to die from Covid-19 than women, anyway
- Smokers are more likely to catch the virus because smoking requires you to repeatedly touch hand to mouth.
In England, 16.4% of men were current smokers in 2018 (12.6% of women) compared with with 42% in 1980 (36% of women).
If you want help to quit smoking, here's the support you need:
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The Men’s Health Forum need your support It’s tough for men to ask for help but if you don’t ask when you need it, things generally only get worse. So we’re asking. In the UK, one man in five dies before the age of 65. If we had health policies and services that better reflected the needs of the whole population, it might not be like that. But it is. Policies and services and indeed men have been like this for a long time and they don’t change overnight just because we want them to. It’s true that the UK’s men don’t have it bad compared to some other groups. We’re not asking you to ‘feel sorry’ for men or put them first. We’re talking here about something more complicated, something that falls outside the traditional charity fund-raising model of ‘doing something for those less fortunate than ourselves’. That model raises money but it seldom changes much. We’re talking about changing the way we look at the world. There is nothing inevitable about premature male death. Services accessible to all, a population better informed. These would benefit everyone - rich and poor, young and old, male and female - and that’s what we’re campaigning for. We’re not asking you to look at images of pity, we’re just asking you to look around at the society you live in, at the men you know and at the families with sons, fathers and grandads missing. Here’s our fund-raising page - please chip in if you can.
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