[Cigarette smoking among secondary school male students in Saddam city, Baghdad]

ABSTRACT

Smoking is one of the serious health problems in our society and in order to find out the size of the problem among the youth, secondary school male students from Saddam city were questioned. It was found that 57% of the students smoke either regularly[22%] or intermittently [35%] with 90% of them started smoking after the age of 12 years. Significant correlation was found between smoking and the number of the years of failure at the school, but there was no significant correlation between smoking and working after school hours. It was also found that 59.6% were not aware of the hazards of smoking which necessitate an urgent educational program to combat smoking especially among the youth