preventable

Each year the NHS spends around £2.5bn on treating health issues caused by smoking – it is the leading cause of preventable illness and deaths.

These include a report on the killing, detention and torture of health care workers released this month by Healthcare Workers Watch, a correspondence published last week in the Lancet documenting a surge in preventable maternal and neonatal deaths in Gaza, and a new report from the U.N.

The plan is part of a series of measures aimed at tackling the health effects of smoking, one of the UK's leading causes of preventable death, disability and ill-health.

There are scores of other women, too, who live in states that ban abortion and have been denied the care they need, were committed to the ICU near death, or denied safe postabortion care and died, or lost their uteruses, or had their fallopian tubes removed—all preventable, but for abortion bans.

The risks of smoking are well known – it's still the leading cause of preventable death in the UK and is responsible for nearly 78,000 deaths annually.