|
Home of Georgia District 4
Little League Baseball and Softball
 |
|
|||
|
|||
|
  |
Smokeless Tobacco: Safer than Cigarettes?
 Let’s ask 25-year old oral cancer survivor, Gruen Von Behrens… “Spit tobacco has ruined my life. Every time I turn around, they are putting me in the hospital either to have surgery or some kind of treatment. If I had known then what I know now, I never would have put a dip in my mouth. Spit tobacco seemed harmless, but in reality it was more than I could handle,” says Von Behrens. Gruen Von Behrens is a 25-year-old oral cancer survivor who has had almost 30 disfiguring surgeries to save his life, including one radical surgery that removed half his neck muscles and lymph nodes and half of his tongue. Like too many teenagers, Von Behrens first tried spit tobacco at age 13 to “fit in.” By age 17, he was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma. Where do kids get this idea? Macho, rugged and carefully-crafted tobacco advertisements have played a large role in spit tobacco use among minors. The tobacco industry touts its spit tobacco products as a “safer alternative to cigarettes,” but Gruen will be the first to tell you that just isn’t so. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 14.8% of high school males in the U.S. currently use spit tobacco. Over 1 million kids in the U.S. will try spit tobacco this year alone, with over 300,000 of them becoming regular users. The use of tobacco is one of the leading contributors to oral disease, and each year over 30,000 people are diagnosed with oral cancer with 50% of them dying within five years. This Stewardson, Illinois native now travels and shares the real life consequences of his own spit tobacco use with the public on behalf of Oral Health America’s National Spit Tobacco Education Program (NSTEP), and warns young people to stay away from the spit tobacco that he believes caused his cancer. Visit the official web site of NSTEP at www.nstep.org .
|
|
