Oklahoma Smokers

It’s been 10 months since the smoking ban went into effect for Oklahoma restaurants and the vast majority of restaurants that formerly permitted smoking either happily or begrudgingly gave smokers the boot.

Some restaurants saw no change in their revenues, some saw their revenues increase and some saw their revenues decrease to the point they have since added ’smoking rooms’ to lure former customers back.

So, after 10 months of smoking ban how does Oklahoma’s ‘health status’ stack up? We don’t know yet, because many of the most recent statistics available are for 2005 or earlier. However those statistics paint a very unhealthy picture of Oklahoma.

For example:

Trust for America’s Health report for 2005 indicates that Oklahoma is the 13th ‘fattest’ state, with 25.4 percent of Oklahoma adults being obese, 61.5 percent of adults being overweight or obese and 15.2 percent of high school students being overweight.

An annual health report by United Health Foundation ranks Oklahoma 44th in the nation in the health of its citizens.

Men’s Health magazine in its 2006 survey of men’s health ranks Tulsa near the bottom of the list, at 96th out of 100 cities. The magazine wrote a letter to the City of Tulsa offering condolences.

Oklahoma’s 2003 (latest available) infant mortality rate of 7.8 deaths per-1,000 live births, is the 14th worst in the nation and is above the national average of 6.9 per-1,000.

According to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation report for 2003-2004 (latest available) 17.5 percent of Oklahoma children lack health insurance coverage. This is second worst rate in the nation.

The Oklahoma Department of Human Services reports that Medicaid paid for the births of 55 percent of the 51,157 born in Oklahoma in 2004 (latest data available) and that about 35 percent of those babies were born to unmarried mothers.

In light of these statistics indicating that Oklahoma is one of the ‘fattest’, least healthy, least insured and most dangerous to kids states in the nation, doesn’t it make you feel all warm and fuzzy knowing that the Oklahoma State Department of Health is so intent on making sure that your second hand smoke doesn’t invade the nostrils of others?

One can only wonder what they could accomplish if the State Health Department actually concentrated on even one of the sad statistics quoted above. Of course ‘going after smokers’ is a lot more fun than ‘going after fat people’.

One can only wonder what they might have in store for a fat smoker, if ever the Oklahoma State Department of Health actually decided to do something about obesity…