All of us deal with risk every day. If you drive on the roads in the UK, you accept a (roughly) 1 in 18,000 chance of dying in a road accident in one year. Given the volume of traffic on our roads, that is a risk most of us are willing to accept. But it is not an unthinking acceptance, because many of us try to minimise the risk by driving carefully, and especially by buying safer cars with air bags and crumple zones. Indeed, with cars having a greater longevity than ever, buying a new car may have more to do with safety than reliability, unless you live next door to someone called Jones.
Yet we shrug off much greater risks. Otherwise why would so many of us smoke? A defining moment for many smokers can be surviving a heart attack, when the folly of our behaviour strikes home, and smoking is given up. Others take the more fatalistic view that the damage is already done, or they need a little pleasure in life. A new systematic review [1] tells us the fatalistic view just ain't so, and that smokers with coronary heart disease have an extra 1 in 10 chance of dying over five years because of their smoking.
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