Tobacco Takes Heavy Toll on Alaskans

In 1986 the Minnesota Department of Health developed a computer software package to assist other states in estimating smoking attributable mortality and economic cost. The Section of Epidemiology used the Minnesota software to enter Alaska specific data for 1985 on the total number of deaths by age and sex, smoking prevalence by age and sex, and estimates of total personal health care expenditures by Alaskans. The computer program takes the Alaska data and applies advanced epidemiologic and health economics methodologies to estimate smoking attributable mortality, years of potential life lost, direct health care cost, direct mortality cost, and indirect morbidity costs.