I’m listening to Mark Twain: Man in White: The Grand Adventure of His Final Years
- Mark Twain wanted perpetual copyright. He was highly motivated to produce works that his heirs could earn an income from and lobbied Congress to make copyright work the same way as land ownership. (Though I don’t think he was advocating for a property tax as well!) Twain’s energetic efforts, including writing pieces scheduled for release decades after his death, proved Gregory Mankiw’s point in “I Can Afford Higher Taxes. But They’ll Make Me Work Less.”
- Mark Twain’s doctor told him, and Twain believed him, that his tobacco smoking habit would kill him via heart disease. This was at least as early as 1900. (Twain lived from 1835 to 1910, from the Steam Age to the Aviation Age.)
The second point is the one that I find most interesting because it wasn’t until the 1960s that health warnings were placed on cigarettes. This was, presumably, because people in Washington, D.C. thought that there were a lot of Americans who believed that conducting what had been an occasional Indian ceremony every 10 or 15 minutes was part of a healthy lifestyle.
If Twain knew that smoking would kill him, which of course it did, why did it take so long for tobacco smoking to become a public health issue in the U.S.? Is it that a lot of other stuff was also dangerous back then and, once antibiotics and vaccines were widespread we finally had the time and attention to think about a habit that killed people in their 60s and 70s? Or something else?
[On the copyright point, Twain’s testimony, delivered in what would become his trademark white suit, did help change copyright in the U.S. from “42 years” to “death of author plus 50”.]
I’m sure that part of it was that the early public health practitioners had their hands full with other problems as you suggest. I think another part of it was the immaturity of field; they just didn’t think about smoking as a public health issue. After all, for a while smoking was normal, something everyone (including medical professionals) did. Data collection systems were also in their infancy. Even if people understood there were adverse health affects, that doesn’t mean they appreciated the magnitude of the public health implications of those affects.
Also: Some people made a lot of money from selling tobacco products and used some of that money to prevent tobacco smoking from becoming a public health issue.
The word (phrase?) “coffin nail” was in use as far back as 1888 – see http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/coffin%20nail . So I think it was known that smoking (or at least cigarettes) were quite bad for you for quite some time.
I don’t want to guess as to why it didn’t turn out to be a big public health interest until the 60s. But, note that although the smoking rate has fallen in half since the 60s – see http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/tables/trends/cig_smoking/ – it is still at 18% among students (and 20%) among adults – where all the students and nearly all the adults started smoking _after_ the big public health push of the 60s (which continues today).
All of which to me means that regardless of the public health interest that started in the 60s – everyone who cares to know knows that smoking will kill you – and they have known that for over 100 years – but they like smoking today (and tomorrow) more than they fear the health risks.
I really cannot be bothered find it for you but there is an interview with Olli Miettinen from McGill who said it was common knowledge that smoking had bad health outcomes, but that knowledge was swept under the rug during WWII, only to be “rediscovered” in the ’60. So it is not surprising Twain was advised to quit for well known health reasons.
Sad that Leonard Nimoy died today of lung disease, in part due to his smoking years ago.
A while back I went to a Leonardo da Vinci exhibit in St. Louis, at which I learned that da Vinci was aware of the dangers of lead paint. It took a mere 500 years for it to be deemed unsafe by the general population…
Hey, old man, are these books on tape you listen to actually “on tape”? You might give “The Emperor of All Maladies” audiobook a listen. It was excellent and I recall a chapter or two on the history of inquiry into relationship between smoking and lung cancer.
I guess it’s true that some people “knew” that smoking was deadly back in 1900, but even in this example, Twain’s doctor is presuming heart disease rather than the lung cancer a modern physician would identify as the chief mortality risk of smoking. Everything I’ve read (not too much, actually) on the subject suggests that the best science on the matter didn’t really converge on the strength of the link between smoking and lung cancer until the middle of the 20th century.
http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/87.full
The history of copyright is distinct from that of real property. Copyright was from day 1 intended to last for a “limited time” in order “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” (Valenti of the MPAA used to say that a limited time to him until was the end of the universe, less 1 day) . Absent a statutory framework, there is no copyright (whereas even primitive societies have concepts of real property). So the question is, what is the minimum time needed to incentive creativity. This balances the needs of creators with public interest in knowledge. Twain was an exception – most creators would be fully incentivized if they could have exclusive rights for the 1st 20 years or so, the same as patents. Most works don’t endure for that long, and because of the nature of discounting to present value, a dollar that you won’t receive until 70 years from now is only worth a few cents today anyway.
@RobF
Modern epidemiology indicates that damage to the heart from smoking is just as likely to kill you early as lung cancer. Those nineteenth century physicians had it right.
The link to lung cancer is more obvious because that’s where the smoke goes but it took longer for the physicians to establish it for certain.
Twain no more believed the claims about smoking back then as any o us do today as we know the truth not one single claim against smoking has ever been proven its all been statistical manipulations back in Twains time the same as today…………..
Mark Twain said it right over a hundred years ago:
“The Moral Statistician.”
Originally published in Sketches, Old and New, 1893
“I don’t want any of your statistics; I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it.
I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man’s health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years’ indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of wine at dinner, etc. etc. And you are always figuring out how many women have been burned to death because of the dangerous fashion of wearing expansive hoops, etc. etc. You never see more than one side of the question.
You are blind to the fact that most old men in America smoke and drink coffee, although, according to your theory, they ought to have died young; and that hearty old Englishmen drink wine and survive it, and portly old Dutchmen both drink and smoke freely, and yet grow older and fatter all the time. And you never try to find out how much solid comfort, relaxation, and enjoyment a man derives from smoking in the course of a lifetime (which is worth ten times the money he would save by letting it alone), nor the appalling aggregate of happiness lost in a lifetime by your kind of people from not smoking. Of course you can save money by denying yourself all those little vicious enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do with it? What use can you put it to? Money can’t save your infinitesimal soul. All the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life; therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment where is the use of accumulating cash?
It won’t do for you to say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing a good table, and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and hungry. And you never dare to laugh in the daytime for fear some poor wretch, seeing you in a good humor, will try to borrow a dollar of you; and in church you are always down on your knees, with your ears buried in the cushion, when the contribution-box comes around; and you never give the revenue officers a full statement of your income.
Now you know all these things yourself, don’t you? Very well, then, what is the use of your stringing out your miserable lives to a lean and withered old age? What is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless to you? In a word, why don’t you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into becoming as ornery and unlovable as you are yourselves, by your villainous “moral statistics”?”
Also, Benjamin Franklin said,
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Judge doesnt accept statistical studies as proof of LC causation!
It was McTear V Imperial Tobacco. Here is the URL for both my summary and the Judge’s ‘opinion’ (aka ‘decision’):
http://boltonsmokersclub.wordpress.com/the-mctear-case-the-analysis/
(2.14) Prof Sir Richard Doll, Mr Gareth Davies (CEO of ITL). Prof James Friend and
Prof Gerad Hastings gave oral evidence at a meeting of the Health Committee in
2000. This event was brought up during the present action as putative evidence that
ITL had admitted that smoking caused various diseases. Although this section is quite
long and detailed, I think that we can miss it out. Essentially, for various reasons, Doll
said that ITL admitted it, but Davies said that ITL had only agreed that smoking might
cause diseases, but ITL did not know. ITL did not contest the public health messages.
(2.62) ITL then had the chance to tell the Judge about what it did when the suspicion
arose of a connection between lung cancer and smoking. Researchers had attempted
to cause lung cancer in animals from tobacco smoke, without success. It was right,
therefore, for ITL to ‘withhold judgement’ as to whether or not tobacco smoke caused
lung cancer.
[9.10] In any event, the pursuer has failed to prove individual causation.
Epidemiology cannot be used to establish causation in any individual case, and the
use of statistics applicable to the general population to determine the likelihood of
causation in an individual is fallacious. Given that there are possible causes of lung
cancer other than cigarette smoking, and given that lung cancer can occur in a nonsmoker,
it is not possible to determine in any individual case whether but for an
individual’s cigarette smoking he probably would not have contracted lung cancer
(paras.[6.172] to [6.185]).
[9.11] In any event there was no lack of reasonable care on the part of ITL at any
point at which Mr McTear consumed their products, and the pursuer’s negligence
case fails. There is no breach of a duty of care on the part of a manufacturer, if a
consumer of the manufacturer’s product is harmed by the product, but the consumer
knew of the product’s potential for causing harm prior to consumption of it. The
individual is well enough served if he is given such information as a normally
intelligent person would include in his assessment of how he wishes to conduct his
life, thus putting him in the position of making an informed choice (paras.[7.167] to
[7.181]).
JOINT STATEMENT ON THE RE-ASSESSMENT OF THE TOXICOLOGICAL TESTING OF TOBACCO PRODUCTS”
7 October, the COT meeting on 26 October and the COC meeting on 18
November 2004.
http://cot.food.gov.uk/pdfs/co…
“5. The Committees commented that tobacco smoke was a highly complex chemical mixture and that the causative agents for smoke induced diseases (such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, effects on reproduction and on offspring) was unknown. The mechanisms by which tobacco induced adverse effects were not established. The best information related to tobacco smoke – induced lung cancer, but even in this instance a detailed mechanism was not available. The Committees therefore agreed that on the basis of current knowledge it would be very difficult to identify a toxicological testing strategy or a biomonitoring approach for use in volunteer studies with smokers where the end-points determined or biomarkers measured were predictive of the overall burden of tobacco-induced adverse disease.”
In other words … our first hand smoke theory is so lame we can’t even design a bogus lab experiment to prove it. In fact … we don’t even know how tobacco does all of the magical things we claim it does.
The greatest threat to the second hand theory is the weakness of the first hand theory.
OSHA also took on the passive smoking fraud and this is what came of it:
Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence: Third Edition
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/13163/reference-manual-on-scientific-evidence-third-edition
This sorta says it all
These limits generally are based on assessments of health risk and calculations of concentrations that are associated with what the regulators believe to be negligibly small risks. The calculations are made after first identifying the total dose of a chemical that is safe (poses a negligible risk) and then determining the concentration of that chemical in the medium of concern that should not be exceeded if exposed individuals (typically those at the high end of media contact) are not to incur a dose greater than the safe one.
So OSHA standards are what is the guideline for what is acceptable ”SAFE LEVELS”
OSHA SAFE LEVELS
All this is in a small sealed room 9×20 and must occur in ONE HOUR.
For Benzo[a]pyrene, 222,000 cigarettes.
“For Acetone, 118,000 cigarettes.
“Toluene would require 50,000 packs of simultaneously smoldering cigarettes.
Acetaldehyde or Hydrazine, more than 14,000 smokers would need to light up.
“For Hydroquinone, “only” 1250 cigarettes.
For arsenic 2 million 500,000 smokers at one time.
The same number of cigarettes required for the other so called chemicals in shs/ets will have the same outcomes.
So, OSHA finally makes a statement on shs/ets :
Field studies of environmental tobacco smoke indicate that under normal conditions, the components in tobacco smoke are diluted below existing Permissible Exposure Levels (PELS.) as referenced in the Air Contaminant Standard (29 CFR 1910.1000)…It would be very rare to find a workplace with so much smoking that any individual PEL would be exceeded.” -Letter From Greg Watchman, Acting Sec’y, OSHA.
Why are their any smoking bans at all they have absolutely no validity to the courts or to science!
Not 1 Death or Sickness Etiologically Assigned to Tobacco. All the diseases attributed to smoking are also present in non smokers. It means, in other words, that they are multifactorial, that is, the result of the interaction of tens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of factors, either known or suspected contributors – of which smoking can be one.
Here’s my all-time favorite “scientific” study of the the anti-smoking campaign: “Lies, Damned Lies, & 400,000 Smoking-Related Deaths,” Robert A. Levy and Rosalind B. Marimont, Journal of Regulation, Vol. 21 (4), 1998.
You can access the article for free on the Cato Institute’s wesbite, Cato.org. This article neither defends nor promotes smoking. Rather it condemns the abuse of statistics to misinform and scare the public. Levy, by the way taught Statistics for Lawyers at Georgetown University Law School. There is also a popular law school class called How to Lie With Statistics.
The Chemistry of Secondary Smoke About 94% of secondary smoke is composed of water vapor and ordinary air with a slight excess of carbon dioxide. Another 3 % is carbon monoxide. The last 3 % contains the rest of the 4,000 or so chemicals supposedly to be found in smoke… but found, obviously, in very small quantities if at all.This is because most of the assumed chemicals have never actually been found in secondhand smoke. (1989 Report of the Surgeon General p. 80). Most of these chemicals can only be found in quantities measured in nanograms, picograms and femtograms. Many cannot even be detected in these amounts: their presence is simply theorized rather than measured. To bring those quantities into a real world perspective, take a saltshaker and shake out a few grains of salt. A single grain of that salt will weigh in the ballpark of 100 million picograms! (Allen Blackman. Chemistry Magazine 10/08/01). – (Excerpted from “Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains” with permission of the author.)
Its funny the average life expectancy in Twains time was about 55 years……..today its 78.8 years regardless of smoking or any lifestyle habits!
Even LC which is very rare even in smokers striking less than 2% of life long smokers hits in the 75-85 year old bracket………..
Lung and Bronchus. Invasive Cancer Incidence Rates and 95% Confidence Intervals by Age and Race and Ethnicity, United States (Table 3.15.1.1M) *†‡
Rates are per 100,000 persons. Rates are per 100,000 persons.
Note the age where LC is found…………..OLD AGE group incidence hits the 500/100,000 at age 75-85
AGE it seems is the deciding factor……….
http://apps.nccd.cdc.gov/uscs/… Cancer Sites Combined&Year=2010&Site=Lung and Bronchus&SurveyInstanceID=1
Physiology is how they created second hand smoke junk science
On average a normal human inhales 14-15 packs of equivalent chemcials from the atmosphere all by itself as everything in tobacco smoke is already in the air we all breathe. That’s why Tobacco control junk reserachers picked continine the metabolite of nicotine to be a bio-marker of being around tobacco smoke,unfortunately for the junk science creators most all our everyday food contains high levels of nitcotine in them already and the scopes of levels for continine from food are at the 1.7 nanogram to 7 nanogram range per liter sample seriously destroying claims of ingestions. Nicotine can be found in everything even out drinking water………..
BTW your body expels toxins consistently even the ones so small they cant be measured like in SHS…….You’ve bought the propaganda and haven’t woken up yet to reality.
Everything you ever heard is a lie about shs.
What the charletons did was take normal body reactions to any stimuli in this case smoke any smoke doesn’t matter and you will get body changes adapted to the environment you are in.
They took these NORMAL body changes physiological changes and suddenly deemed them disease causing………It was a fabricated lie as the body within minutes to hours reverts back to normal……….Going into the cold,heat,excersice matters not you get these changes even eating a hearty meal causes the same effects. Its also the same thing they did with direct smoking. They couldn’t get past the chemistry happening during smoking and the bodily changes that happened when you smoke. Which physiological changes that correct themselves naturally yet again and cause no harm at all. Yet here again they claimed disease causing with nothing to back them up but their junk epidemiology then creating a new word CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP! Its all been smoke and mirrors.
If smoking did cause LC then everyone should get it right,yet 94-98% of life long smokers don’t get it. Which leaves a whole avenue of actual genetic breakdown due to aging as the CULPRIT!
Where are the Invasive cancers found for bronchial and lung in the 78-85 year old bracket at a whopping 500 per 100,000 of the population. AGE IS THE DISEASE
Then they pull a sweet lil play and use age adjustment formulas to take the older folks with all the cancer and move them down into the younger age groups to inflate the outcomes!
That my friend is where 50 years of propaganda came from!
don’t want to guess as to why it didn’t turn out to be a big public health interest until the 60s. But, note that although the smoking rate has fallen in half since the 60s – see http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/tables/trends/cig_smoking/ – it is still at 18% among students (and 20%) among adults – where all the students and nearly all the adults started smoking _after_ the big public health push of the 60s (which continues today).
In 1960 there were 50-60 million americans smoking today there are still 50-60 million American smoking………
Now how can We believe CDC numbers on smoking rates when even the Federal Government knows they are UNRELIABLE!
Survey experts agree that survey respondents understate the true extent of their cigarette consumption. If taken as true, the responses in the surveys we examined, would suggest that, on average, only 70 percent of purchased cigarettes were reported to be actually consumed, which strains credulity. The substantial uncertainty surrounding the degree of underreporting of cigarette consumption in survey data necessarily generates large uncertainty about the magnitude of the federal tax receipts lost due to the illicit cigarette trade. Any estimate of federal tax loss based on survey data therefore should be regarded as only broadly indicative of actual receipts lost.4
http://www.ttb.gov/pdf/tobacco…
Read more at http://guardianlv.com/2014/12/smoking-on-the-decline-in-united-states/#FKdH61RKor0MKSgv.99
I read the CDC operational plan for doing these smoker numbers awhile back.
They pick a state and in that state they pick a few select cities calling anywhere from 600-1200 numbers.
The problem here is they tend to choose cities with high liberal leanings but also because that’s where they are able to maximize their propaganda to the masses more heavily and also impose enforcement more strongly.
Yes these people will lie on both sides of the study.
In Iowa just 6 months ago they discovered and OMG moment when they did ZeroCare signups and found the smoking rate had dropped in half from other surveys that had been performed in the past.
The reason zerocare charges you out the ass for premiums doubling and even tripling if you state your a smoker……….
Now this is likely the same thing NATIONWIDE………………
Since they meaning the zerocare exchanges are desperately trying to sign up everyone they can in fact you don’t even have to pick a plan this year they said,just sign up and you wont be hit with penalties……..
So knowing this and knowing its the poor as well as the rest as zerocare caused 10s of millions to lose their own insurance who will now have to sig up too or penalties.
Point here is ZEROCARE is forcing people to identify themselves as non smokers and theyd do it on any survey form these days because they know any survey might get their name if they have your phone numbr they can simply cross reference it to zerocare applications and your PERJURED!
Then we have the fact that the GOP just got control and thye are no lovers of the prohibitionists at least for the most part and the way its looking they plan to cut funding to these groups.
So CDC and all of the anti groups have every reason to create a dramatic drop in smoker study to say see our tactics do work and we need more money bla bla bla……..
SMOKE Aand Mirrors doesn’t even describe it well enuf.
On Twitter someone shared a 1912 poster from Indian State Board of Health
I am Death
To Early Join me
Breath much foul air.
Drink Alcoholic liquors.
Eat Midnight Suppers.
Eat Lots of Rich Food.
Bolt Your food or wash with large amounts
of black coffee.
Neglect your Bowls.
Mummies’ clogged arteries take smoking, fatty foods, lethargy out of the mix
By Tom Valeo, Times Correspondent
Tuesday, April 23, 2013 4:30am
You do everything right: You exercise every day, include lots of fruits and vegetables in your diet, never smoke, minimize the stress in your life and take medication to keep your cholesterol and blood pressure under control. You’re preventing modern life from ruining your heart, right? • Well, maybe modern life isn’t as much of a problem as merely living. CT scans of 137 ancient mummies from three continents show that our ancestors had plaque in their arteries, too, even though they never smoked, never tasted ice cream or pork rinds, and had no choice but to exercise vigorously every day of their lives.
According to the study, which appeared recently in the Lancet, at least one-third of the mummies, who lived as long as 5,000 years ago, had arteries that had narrowed as a result of atherosclerosis — the buildup of fatty deposits in the arterial wall. Apparently the cardiovascular system has a tendency to clog up over time.
“Our research shows that we are all at risk for atherosclerosis, the disease that causes heart attacks and strokes,” said Gregory Thomas, medical director of the MemorialCare Heart & Vascular Institute, Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, and one of the authors of the study. “The data we gathered about individuals from the prehistoric cultures of ancient Peru and the Native Americans living along the Colorado River and the Unangan of the Aleutian Islands is forcing us to look for other factors that may cause heart disease.”
The diet of the mummies varied widely, but contained ample protein and vegetables (and presumably no cupcakes or pork rinds). Aside from the few Egyptian mummies who lived their lives as pampered royalty, these ancient people used their muscles constantly.
Yet, the atherosclerosis was found in mummies who died in what we today would consider middle age (almost none made it to 60). And just as today, their arteries became more narrow as they got older. CT scans of modern people have demonstrated that after the age of 60 for men and 70 for women, some degree of atherosclerosis is all but universal. One large study found that teens ages 15 to 19 showed early signs of atherosclerosis, and 50 percent already had conspicuous accumulations of plaque.
“All of us age in every tissue of our body,” says Dr. Donald LaVan, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and a spokesman for the American Heart Association. “It’s just a question of how rapidly it happens. There’s nothing you can do to stop aging. All you’re trying to do is prevent it from advancing faster than it should.”
The authors of the paper agree. “Although commonly assumed to be a modern disease, the presence of atherosclerosis in premodern humans raises the possibility of a more basic predisposition to the disease,” they concluded.
So what can we do to thwart that predisposition?
Above all, don’t smoke, says LaVan, and engage in regular physical activity.
“After that, we’re in the realm of treating disease,” he says. “If your lipids are up or you have hypertension, take care of it. If you have problems with rhythm disturbances, that must be treated, too, because it impairs the ability of heart to pump efficiently. We’re looking at common sense here, but getting patients to do these things is tough.”
http://www.tampabay.com/news/aging/lifetimes/mummies-clogged-arteries-take-smoking-fatty-foods-lethargy-out-of-the-mix/2114897
The rise of a pseudo-scientific links lobby
Every day there seems to be a new study making a link between food, chemicals or lifestyle and ill-health. None of them has any link with reality.
spiked-onlinedotcom/newsite/article/13287#dotU6ibAzYo59A
Smokers’ lungs used in half of transplants
Almost half of lung transplant patients were given the lungs taken from heavy smokers, with one in five coming from donors who had smoked at least one packet of cigarettes a day for 20 or more years
Despite this, new research shows that those people given the lungs of smokers were just as likely to be alive up to three years after transplantation as those who had organs from non-smokers. In some cases, they had improved survival rates.
“Donor lungs from even heavy smokers may provide a valuable avenue for increasing donor organ availability,” says André Simon, director of heart and lung transplantation and consultant cardiac surgeon at Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Trust.
“Our findings provide for the first time real world figures for the perceived risk of implantation of lungs from donors with even a heavy smoking history, and they show that such donor lungs may provide a much-needed lease on life to the critically ill patient whose chances of survival diminish with every day or week that passes by on the waiting list.
“I believe that candidates significantly decrease their chances of survival if they choose to decline organs from smokers.”
Lung transplantation is a life-saving therapy for patients with end-stage lung disease, but a shortage of organ donors means people are dying while waiting. UK Transplant Registry data show that only 20 per cent get transplants within six months. The figure rises to 51 per cent after three years, but by that time nearly one in three patients has died waiting for a transplant.
Transplant patients who are given smokers’ lungs (right) are just as likely to survive as those who receive organs from non-smokers (left), a study has revealed. Some patients even had higher survival rates”http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2550424/Smokers-lungs-just-likely-transplant-patients-alive-non-smokers-organs.html#ixzz3DmLHYLj9
This pretty well destroys the Myth of second hand smoke:
http://vitals.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/28/16741714-lungs-from-pack-a-day-smokers-safe-for-transplant-study-finds?lite
Lungs from pack-a-day smokers safe for transplant, study finds.
By JoNel Aleccia, Staff Writer, NBC News.
Using lung transplants from heavy smokers may sound like a cruel joke, but a new study finds that organs taken from people who puffed a pack a day for more than 20 years are likely safe.
What’s more, the analysis of lung transplant data from the U.S. between 2005 and 2011 confirms what transplant experts say they already know: For some patients on a crowded organ waiting list, lungs from smokers are better than none.
“I think people are grateful just to have a shot at getting lungs,” said Dr. Sharven Taghavi, a cardiovascular surgical resident at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, who led the new study………………………
Ive done the math here and this is how it works out with second ahnd smoke and people inhaling it!
The 16 cities study conducted by the U.S. DEPT OF ENERGY and later by Oakridge National laboratories discovered:
Cigarette smoke, bartenders annual exposure to smoke rises, at most, to the equivalent of 6 cigarettes/year.
146,000 CIGARETTES SMOKED IN 20 YEARS AT 1 PACK A DAY.
A bartender would have to work in second hand smoke for 2433 years to get an equivalent dose.
Then the average non-smoker in a ventilated restaurant for an hour would have to go back and forth each day for 119,000 years to get an equivalent 20 years of smoking a pack a day! Pretty well impossible ehh!
The whole tone of the article seems to be that the NHS is prepared to grant us an enormous favour by consenting to use our filthy organs. Oh, and don’t miss the comments; they’re hilarious…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2756908/Donor-lungs-heavy-smoker-That-s-terrible-dilemma-Sharee-faced.html
A few days ago, someone posted something to the effect that NRT (with its nicotine) wasn’t harmful to fetuses. But here’s something even more interesting. Study showing smoking has no ill effects, but NRT does:
Smoking mothers were younger, weighed less, consumed more alcohol, and had received less education. Children exposed to prenatal tobacco smoking had no increase in congenital malformations prevalence compared with the nonexposed children in both crude and adjusted analyses. Children born to nonsmokers, but who used nicotine substitutes, had a slightly increased relative congenital malformations prevalence ratio; relative prevalence rate ratio was 1.61 (95% confidence interval 1.01-2.58), which represents a 60% increased risk. When the analysis was restricted to musculoskeletal malformations, the relative prevalence rate ratio was 2.63 (95% confidence interval 1.53-4.52).
CONCLUSION:
Our results showed no increase in congenital malformations related to prenatal tobacco smoking. However, we identified an increase of malformations risk in nonsmokers using nicotine substitutes. “
link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16394039
The myth of smoking during pregnancy being harmful
Wed, 30 Oct 2013 17:51 CDT
In about 1999 I was asked to analyze the data of pregnant women with respect to smoking for a major health insurance company. They were running a campaign to get pregnant women to stop smoking and they expected to find interesting data to support their case.
I used to teach college courses covering the topic. The text books said that smoking causes underweight premature babies. Because of this babies of smoking mothers are more likely to have birth defects. With alcohol, two drinks a day was considered safe, but with tobacco, there was no safe threshold. I thought this was rather strange. You smoke one cigarette while pregnant and you are more likely to have birth defects? Even for a hard core health fanatic that is difficult to believe.
Here is what was found in the data. Babies of smoking mothers average weight was 3232 grams (7.1 lbs.). Babies of non-smoking mothers averaged 3398 grams (7.5 lbs.). That is about a half pound difference and it is statistically significant. Seven pounds is a good healthy birth weight that does not set off any alarms. Babies are considered underweight if they are less than 2270 grams (5 lbs.). 4.5% of smoking mothers babies were underweight and 3.3% of non-smoking mothers babies were underweight. This difference is not significant. There is no indication here of a health risk from smoking based on weight.
The other risk factor is length of term. Normal gestation is 253 days. 4% of smoking mothers did not go to term and 7.8% of non-smoking mothers did not go to term. Smoking mothers did better than non-smoking mothers but the difference was not significant. There was obviously no risk from reduced term for smoking mothers.
Because the non-smoking mothers had heavier babies one would expect more C-Sections from the non-smoking mothers. There were about 20% more. This is significant at the .05 level but not the .01 level so you could argue the significance either way depending on your bias. The data here is limited because only 5% of pregnant women smoked but the trend for smoking mothers was toward less babies retained in the hospital, less C-Sections, insignificantly fewer pre-term deliveries and an insignificant increase in clinically underweight babies.
This data can be explained by assuming that when pregnant women are stressed, they self medicate to relieve the stress. Non-smoking women tend to eat more causing the baby to be larger and more difficult to deliver. This can also cause other problems. Smoking women tend to light up when under stress. This is less harmful to the baby than over-eating. For this reason smoking mothers tended to have better outcomes for baby and mother. They also cost less for the insurance company.
You might be interested in knowing that this information was not used. I was told that the medical insurance business is highly regulated by the government. The company was not allowed to tell the truth about these results even though it was better for the insurance company and for the patients.
I do not think these results suggest that women should start smoking when they get pregnant. I do think it indicates that it is very poor practice to try to get smoking mothers to stop smoking when they get pregnant.
About me
I have a Ph.D. in experimental psychology and have worked in both research and teaching. I am a health nut and do not endorse smoking or care to be around people smoking. I was shocked by these results. My bias if any is certainly against these results. However I think it is horrible to withhold information form people and intentionally give them bad advice to advance a political agenda.
Epidemiologists Vote to Keep Doing Junk Science
Epidemiology Monitor (October 1997)
An estimated 300 attendees a recent meeting of the American College of
Epidemiology voted approximately 2 to 1 to keep doing junk science!
Specifically, the attending epidemiologists voted against a motion
proposed in an Oxford-style debate that “risk factor” epidemiology is
placing the field of epidemiology at risk of losing its credibility.
Risk factor epidemiology focuses on specific cause-and-effect
relationships–like heavy coffee drinking increases heart attack risk. A
different approach to epidemiology might take a broader
perspective–placing heart attack risk in the context of more than just
one risk factor, including social factors.
Risk factor epidemiology is nothing more than a perpetual junk science machine.
But as NIEHS epidemiologist Marilyn Tseng said “It’s hard to be an
epidemiologist and vote that what most of us are doing is actually harmful
to epidemiology.”
But who really cares about what they’re doing to epidemiology. I thought
it was public health that mattered!
we have seen the “SELECTIVE” blindness disease that
Scientist have practiced over the past ten years. Seems the only color they
see is GREEN BACKS, it’s a very infectious disease that has spread through
the Scientific community with the same speed that any infectious disease
would spread. And has affected the T(thinking) Cells as well as sight.
Seems their eyes see only what their paid to see. To be honest, I feel
after the Agent Orange Ranch Hand Study, and the Sl-utz and Nutz Implant
Study, they have cast a dark shadow over their profession of being anything
other than traveling professional witnesses for corporate hire with a lack
of moral concern to their obligation of science and truth.
The true “Risk Factor” is a question of ; will they ever be able to earn
back the respect of their profession as an Oath to Science, instead of
corporate paid witnesses with selective vision?
Oh, if this seems way harsh, it’s nothing compared to the damage of peoples
lives that selective blindness has caused!
When I visit my Dr. for annual physical exam, one of his regular questions is this: Do you wear seat-belt?
Looks like my Dr. understands being in a car accident without a seat-belt is a high risk ordeal as anything else.
There is no danger from second-hand smoke, period. In America, the Baby Boom produced over 75 million kids, and smoking was very popular during that time.
Exposure to SHS was prevalent everywhere people went: in homes, yards, parks and playgrounds; in dime stores, drugstores, supermarkets – in every store, as well as banks, post offices, libraries, anywhere that people gathered. Also in cars, buses, taxis, planes and trains.
There were smokers in diners, cafes, restaurants; in hotels, barber shops, beauty salons; in hospitals, waiting rooms, stations, lobbies, airports, and in all vacation spots and summer camps. There was smoking at swimming pools, beaches and all the sports venues; at parties, church events, any type of social gathering. There was smoking from neighbors, visitors, relatives and older siblings; from babysitters, coaches, even from den mothers and scout leaders.
Think about it. Children were constantly exposed to SHS everywhere they went, every day of their lives. The only exception were classrooms and churches.
Did they all die? Did they get diseased? Did they develop asthma? Nope. But according to today’s whingers (it’s for the cheeeeeldren!), none of those kids should have made it past the crib. With all that SHS exposure, the schools should have been half-empty on a daily basis, with hoards of absentee kids filling up the hospitals. Such was never the case, and you can’t re-write the history. All those kids managed perfectly well. These are facts.
All the anti-smokers got is junk science, propaganda and drivel..
John: Can we summarize your comments with “Taxpayers shouldn’t send free cartons of cigarettes to retired public employees in hopes of staving off pension-obligation-induced bankruptcy”?
Regarding 2nd hand smoke, regardless of whether it kills you (it probably doesn’t – the dose makes the poison) I remember sitting in the old days on buses, in airplanes, bars, hotel room, etc. where smoking was allowed and it was unpleasant and it stank and your clothes stank afterward. The division between “smoking” and “non-smoking” sections was a joke. So I’m glad that you can’t smoke in these places anymore. It was always incredibly rude and inconsiderate and non-smokers had to endure it for centuries.
People knew in 1602 that smoking was deadly.
http://her.oxfordjournals.org/content/20/1/101.full.pdf