WASHINGTON -- Nearly 10 percent of sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders are smoking cigarettes, federal health officials reported yesterday after the first national survey of middle school students.
"It's not surprising when you realize that over one-fourth of high school students smoke -- and they have to start sometime," said Michael P. Eriksen, director of the office on smoking and health at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which released the study.
CDC for many years has surveyed the tobacco habits of high schoolers -- the studies are regarded as a reliable barometer of smoking patterns among the nation's teen-agers -- but this is the first time the agency has included a comprehensive look at middle school students, ages 11 to 14, along with the older teen-age group.
Specifically, 9.2 percent of middle school students and 28.4 percent of high school students said that they are cigarette smokers.
Unless these trends are reversed, 5 million children under the age of 18 alive today in the United States will die prematurely from cigarette addiction, Eriksen said.
Equally sobering, black youths -- who as high schoolers have historically smoked less and still smoke less than their white counterparts -- now show comparable rates of tobacco use in the middle school years, according to the survey.
"If this pattern continues into high school, we will lose the advantage that African-American teens have enjoyed for the last two decades," Eriksen said.
Since 1976, there has been a considerable gap between the smoking habits of black and white teen-agers, with smoking rates among blacks declining.
Although smoking nearly doubled among black high schoolers between 1991 and 1997, they still continue to lag far behind whites, at 15.8 percent, compared with 32.8 percent among whites and 25.8 percent among Latinos, the CDC said.
But there are no such differences among middle schoolers, the report said. Black middle school students had smoking rates of 9 percent, similar to those for whites, 8.8 percent, and Latinos, 11 percent.
Dr. Lonnie Bristow, past president of the American Medical Association, called for more research, combined with sustained efforts to "counter the appeal and social acceptance of tobacco use among all young people."
