And have you noticed...

And have you noticed that the horribly oversimplistic and misleading "speed kills" campaign seems to have been wound down? Has it been replaced, I wonder, by the much worthier "stop smoking" blitz? I know what you"re thinking: this guy"s obviously a motorist who occasionally speeds and doesn"t smoke, so it"s no surprise that he"s selfishly in favour of anti-smoking rather than anti-speeding action.

That"s absolutely true, but for good reason. You see, driving is something that is done by at least 32 million people - the number of legal licence holders in Britain. On top of that, there are the 20 million or so passengers they carry. Even if we ignore visiting motorists from overseas, plus unlicenced drivers, we have around 50 million car users.

Now although I"m the first to complain that 3,500 annual deaths on Britain"s roads is 3,500 too many, this fatality rate has to be put into context. The fact is that it"s only a tiny percentage of the 52 million regular car users. Compare that with smoking. According to medical specialists I"ve spoken to, half of smokers are killed by their habit. So a fraction of one per cent die from car use, but around 50 per cent kill themselves with tobacco.

My point is this. Some everyday activities are comparatively safe, while others are the very opposite. It"s good that the powers that be warn us about some of the things that can hurt or kill us, but such warnings need to be listed in order of severity. Surely it"s all about dealing with the biggest, deadliest dangers first?

With that in mind, I can tell you that nearly as many people die in accidental falls, poisonings or suicides as in road accidents each year. Leukaemia, for example, kills more people than car crashes. Furthermore, a regular eye test at an opticians can detect this condition at an early stage. But why did it take the premature death of a young man in my family to find this out? Why aren"t the health experts telling us?

It"s true that there are dangers in speeding in the wrong place at the wrong time, but we need to explain that it"s excessive or inappropriate speed which is really dangerous. And why the obsession with speed? It"s by no means a factor in all accidents. Failing to wear a seatbelt, falling asleep at the wheel, driving an unroadworthy vehicle, driving under the influence, playing with the stereo/sat-nav and using hand-held mobile phones can all be as dangerous as speeding. But none is as certain to harm you as smoking.