Tobacco Free Weld County

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• Tobacco Disparities
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While tobacco may be an equal opportunity killer for those who use it or are exposed to it, there are certain groups of people who are affected by tobacco burdens even more than others. We call these tobacco disparities or tobacco inequalities. These disparities or differences can be manifested in a variety of ways including:

• Differences in the incidence, prevalence, mortality, and burden of diseases and other adverse health conditions that exist among specific population groups in the United States –National Institutes of Health 
• Lower level of access to prevention or cessation service programs, tobacco industry targeting and marketing, exposure to SHS, higher rates of use or a combination.

What this means is that, for instance, in the Latino community of Weld County we see a lower rate of tobacco use but more problems related to health care access. We strive to maintain the positive disparity (lower rate of use) while eliminating the negative disparity (low access to health care). 

Another way that disparities manifest themselves is with the diseases themselves. With tobacco use, a variety of diseases can present including various cancers and cardio/pulmonary diseases. The disparities associated with these diseases include:

• Getting the disease more often
• Being diagnosed with a later stage of the disease
• Receiving poorer care
• Suffering more and having a poorer quality of life
• Being less likely to survive the disease
• Dying from the disease in greater numbers

Others argue that the health inequality is not so much in the difference between different populations so much as the difference between what is possible with our current knowledge of disease and health and what is actually occurring. Unfortunately, often times even these numbers have huge discrepancies between groups with social advantage and groups with social disadvantages.
Ten groups are currently identified as Colorado populations experiencing tobacco-related disparities:

• African Americans
• American Indians
• Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders
• LGBTIQ (Gay and Lesbian community)
• Latinos and Hispanics
• People with low socioeconomic status (socially disadvantaged)
• People with disabilities
• People with mental illnesses
• People with substance abuse disorders and
• Spit tobacco users

Other groups who may be targeted by the tobacco industry or otherwise affected by a tobacco disparity are continuously evaluated including incarcerated, adjudicated and homeless and more.

Tobacco is not an equal opportunity burden. Its addiction, toxic smoke exposures, and other impacts are excessively common among some of Colorado's non-white populations and people with social or economic disadvantages. Tobacco burdens include smoking, not quitting smoking, not using help or getting advice to quit, using snuff or chewing tobacco, being exposed to secondhand smoke, and not knowing secondhand smoke is dangerous. Many tobacco burdens originate with cigarette smoking.