Cigars and Asthma – not as related as you would expect!

With all the studies out there linking smoking and various diseases like asthma, this graph caught me off-guard. I expected there to be a high correlation between two variables like cases of asthma and cigar smoking, but I found that the two, while indeed seemingly correlated, were dwarfed by the variable of borough. In Manhattan, for instance, while there is a much greater population and thus more cases of asthma, there is still a higher quantity of asthma cases per unit of population. Staten Island, on the other hand, has a very high rate of cigar smoking, but much lower cases of asthma. In two boroughs of Queens, bordering Brooklyn, one even clearly see a neighborhood where many people quit smoking have more cases of asthma than one where many people smoke. I found much of this data very interesting and worth looking into further to discover the truth behind asthma and smoking.