Released on Tuesday to considerable comment from the media, this new report from the US Surgeon General reveals that smoking has become a leading killer of American women in just two generations. Women now account for 39 percent of the country's smoking-related deaths, more than doubling the proportion of 1965. While the rate of adult women smokers has not changed much, that of teenaged girls has...

On Wednesday, the nation's major tobacco companies lost the first class-action lawsuit to reach a verdict when a Florida jury decided that the companies had conspired to hide the dangers of smoking. The decision, which allows for both compensatory and punitive damages, could give hundreds of thousands of smokers or their families in Florida the opportunity to make billions of dollars of claims on...

The University of California, San Francisco Library and the American Legacy Foundation recently released the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL), a collection of more than 20 million previously private documents from tobacco industry files. Ranging from approximately the 1950s to recent years, LTDL offers searching, viewing, and downloading of documents, covering projects central to the...

The NOVA documentary "Search for a Safe Cigarette" recounts the tobacco industry's decades-long attempt to engineer a safer cigarette. This companion Web site offers a number of interesting and informative features, as well as a lesson plan for grades 5-8 and 9-12. The interactive feature titled Anatomy of a Cigarette offers a fascinating tour of the conventional cigarette and two "safer"...

The Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention, founded in 1992 at the University of Wisconsin, has been a leader in researching tobacco dependence and its treatment, and their Web site contains information about their current and ongoing projects. Quite a bit of the site is devoted to providing educational material for the public, including a series of fact sheets on tobacco use in Wisconsin...

This week's In the News examines the November 16, 1998 $206 billion settlement reached between tobacco industry leaders and eight US states. The twelve resources discussed provide press releases, opinion, and background information on the economics of tobacco production and consumption in the US. Following increasing pressure from anti-tobacco activists at the state level, Philip Morris...

Sponsored and hosted by the University of California-San Francisco Library & Center for Knowledge Management, Department of Archives & Special Collections, this site offers a wealth of papers, unpublished documents, and electronic resources relevant to tobacco control issues (primarily in California). The final version of the archive will contain over 40 million pages of documents, but even now...

The World Health Organization (WHO) released their 1999 report on the state of the World's Health. Citing successes in the decline of mortality and an increase in health and economic productivity for much of the world, the report balances its good news with analysis of continuing problems of malnutrition, infectious diseases, tuberculosis, and tobacco use in much of the developing world. Data...