However, the success of risk factor epidemiology has been more temporary and more limited than might have been expected (S. Wing, Concepts in modem epidemiology: population, risk, doseresponse and confounding, unpublished
manuscript). It is one thing to discover that tobacco smoke is the major cause of lung cancer, but redressing this situation is a different problem entirely. For example, smoking can be viewed as a strategy enabling women to cope with
stress, while at the same time undermining their health and that of their children. Any meaningful public health intervention regarding tobacco must also consider why manual workers smoke more than nonmanual workers and find it
more difficult to give smoking up and why most physicians have responded to the epidemiologic evidence and given up
smoking, whereas nurses continue to smoke in great numbers. Moreover, it can be argued that the fundamental problem
of tobacco lies in its production rather than in its consumption. The limited success of legislative measures in industrialized countries has led the tobacco industry to shift its promotional activities to developing countries, so that more
people are exposed to tobacco smoke than ever before. Similar shifts have occurred for some occupational carcinogens.
Thus, on a global basis the "achievement" of the public health movement has often been to move public health problems from rich countries to poor countries and from rich to poor populations within the industrialized countries. Of course, this is not solely the fault of epidemiologists. However, when a public health problem is studied in individual terms (e.g., tobacco smoking) rather than in population terms (e.g., tobacco production, advertising, and distribution, and the social and economic influences on consumption), then it is very likely that the solution will also be defined in individual terms and the resulting public health action will merely move the problem rather than solve it.