Posted on 12/09/2010 1:18:16 PM PST by upchuck
[This has been edited to fit within the excerpting guidelines.]
Think the occasional cigarette won't hurt? Even a bit of social smoking or inhaling someone else's secondhand smoke could be enough to block your arteries and trigger a heart attack, says the newest surgeon general's report on the killer the nation just can't kick.
Thursday's report says there's no doubt that tobacco smoke begins poisoning immediately as more than 7,000 chemicals in each puff rapidly spread through the body to cause cellular damage in nearly every organ.
"That one puff on that cigarette could be the one that causes your heart attack," said Surgeon General Regina Benjamin. "I advise people to try to avoid being around smoking any way that you can."
...this newest report is unusual because it devotes more than 700 pages to detail the biology of how cigarette smoke accomplishes its dirty deeds including the latest genetic findings to help explain why some people become more addicted than others, and why some smokers develop tobacco-caused disease faster than others.
There is no safe level of exposure to cigarette smoke, whether you deliberately inhale it or are a nonsmoker who breathes in other people's fumes, the report concludes. Nor is there evidence yet to tell if efforts to develop so-called safer cigarettes really will pan out.
(Excerpt) Read more at ajc.com ...
Thanks for the ping!
All these nonsmokers sure enjoy our sin taxes though. I wish they would mind their own business. If I want to smoke it is my business & I pay too much for a pack as it is. I am so darn tired of non smokers who are hateful, impolite & rude. If they don’t like it then they can move away from me. I try to not smoke around my nonsmoking friends but am truly tired of their preaching. And yes I am trying to stop but with all the stress in my life it is hard. Nonsmokers or former smokers are some of the rudest people I have ever known.
“WHAT protected them? If I was a doctor...Id want to know.”
And have the general population living to age 100? Do you know what that would do to Social Security?
/s!
I don’t like that moron either. I don’t think he should be seen in public. He is screwy & a criminal IMO.
Yep. Saying that secondhand smoke causes lung cancer is like expecting people to drown if they are close enough to a swimming pool to smell the chlorine.
In my family, sort of the opposite.
My paternal grandmother lived well into her eighties, and so did her sisters. Her baby brother, who was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge, is still around and in good health. Don’t recal if he smokes, but Grammy smoked like a chimney and her sisters smoked. Her parents lived until her Dad was 93 and her Mom was 88. However, my grandfather dropped dead from a heart arrythmia that may have been exacerbated by smoking.
My maternal grandmother also lived well into her eighties, and her Mom died at the age of 93. But my granddad died much earlier (heavy smoker) and only after suffering for more than a decade with lung problems. His sister, a non-smoker, lived well into her eighties.
This anecdotal evidence seems to me to say that some people have a long life span and some don’t, that there are some lifestyle factors, and smoking creams some people quite badly while letting others off the hook.
I see no alternative but to issue every man, woman and child their very own personal hazmat suit. The world’s become so very dangerous out there.
And if you take it off or loosen the seals, you are subject to fine or imprisonment.
Judging by the comments, I think everyone gets it now. The grant junkies, Big PhRma rent seekers and Statists in anti-tobacco are frauds and liars.
Worse than 100 Lying big tobacco companies. The people aren’t as think as they dumb we are.
Wayne,
It’s not too late for any FReepers or normal Americans who believe the Second Hand Smoke canard to buy a pre-planned funeral or burial plot.
We’ve all spent time in smokey uncles houses, bars, bowling alleys, fraternity/sorority houses. We’re all dead. These fools are a laughing stock but they don’t get the joke.
It may be annoying and smelly to normal people but you are not dying.
Me, too. 62, low BP, healthy heart, been smoking since I was 16 years old. Wonder how they can explain that away.
Congress' establishment of a national hospital system in 1870 was the Federal government's foot in the door of health care. Now, the whole body's inside.
It would seem to me that means there are other factors involved. Maybe its not the smoking at all.
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