Apparently, smoking is so dangerous that it causes damage in minutes of taking that first drag.
Smoking damages the body in minutes rather than years, according to research in the US.
The report, published in Chemical Research in Toxicology, shows that chemicals which cause cancer form rapidly after smoking.
Scary… Still, this will have involved some serious epidemiology, won’t it?
Scientists involved in the small-scale study described the results as a stark warning to people considering smoking.
Small scale study? That looks like a “no” then. Apparently, they carried out their research with twelve people…
A PAH was added to the subject’s cigarettes, which was then modified by the body and turned into another chemical which damages DNA and has been linked with cancer.
The use of wording here is wonderfully vague. What actually happened was that the PAH was modified in the body within minutes. Any damage to DNA may well take place subsequently – we don’t know how long because this is not what we are actually being told. So, a big scare over nothing much.
Still, ASH gets its oar in:
Anti-smoking charity Ash described the research as “chilling” and as a warning that it is never too early to quit.
Chilling, eh? And stark. I just love the use of alarmist language. The reality is that a small scale experiment pointed towards some possible findings. Without a large scale test across a wide range of the population, it’s meaningless. There are plenty of smokers who do not develop cancer and plenty of non-smokers who do. The propensity to develop cancer varies from individual to individual. Junk science won’t change that.
Both of my paternal grandparents were heavy smokers. My grandfather died in his seventies and my grandmother died in her nineties. Sure, if they hadn’t smoked, maybe they would have survived the bronchitis and pneumonia that carried them off and maybe not. Neither died of lung cancer, though and if the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) in their fags really did affect their DNA, neither of them noticed.
I don’t smoke and never have, so have no particular axe to grind on smoking. If people do it, it’s up to them. They are aware of the possible consequences and choose to take the risk. That’s their choice, frankly. What does annoy me is the increasingly shrill, banshee screeching from the bansturbators and taxpayer funded leeches determined to tell us how to live and who will distort the scientific principle to do so. Twelve subjects does not make sufficient case for this reporting. Go away and do a proper study over a wide range of subjects over a decent period of time and maybe I’ll think about taking you seriously – the emphasis being on the “maybe”.
Oh, yeah, cui bono?
The research was funded by the US National Cancer Institute.
Well, I never…
And yet again, the anti-smoking nutters choose a Sunday to release it to the press. They really are miserable in the extreme, aren’t they?
Does anyone within ASH realise that if they succeed in their mission they will all be out of work and their pensions will disappear?
It would be interesting though to see all smokers smoke ‘indoors’ for a week or two to see what impact it would have on the righteous.
Worryingly this has been covered by the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12193602 who were doing quite well for a while but seem to have re-emerged as the principle propaganda outlet for ASH in recent weeks. I suspect that their news team have indeed been infiltrated by an anti-smoking activist.
The BBC claims to be impartial but I think that no magistrate in the land would accept that statement if given the actual content of the recent research /political activity related to smoking and the BBC coverage of the subject. If I didn’t know better I would believe that my news was being written by ASH. To complain about this obvious editorial bias you can try http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/homepage/
Have you ever been to a cookout or a campfire or just been alive and breathed?
If you answered yes then your not alone all of us breathe in these PAH’S everyday of our lives just from the air itself!
Basically these supposed researchers didnt bother to do a comparison group of
campers or 4th of july family cookout victims of PAH’s.
Remeber the grilled food scare of burned food causing cancer…pah’s again same thing diferent route…..
But they would have found the same genetic changes in these same folks.
Super doped levels of non-toxic phenanthrene……the stuff shows up in 15-30 minutes when tested……thats just proof positive of an immune system working properly!!!
epa.gov/osw/hazard/wastemin/minimize/factshts/phenanth.pdf
HUMAN TOXICITY………PAH’s leave the body within days in urined and feces
exposure from everywhere………theres no way they could have stopped exposure from other sources……they gave the folks super doses to try and show genetic changes which they already knew to happen at super high doses………they chose this phenanthrene because it doesnt harm anyone………what they got was what they already knew was going to happen as its been know for decades……….remember dose makes the poison and they spun this one using mega doses to show genetic changes that they knew would happen at such high doses already……..
PAH’s are in such low concentrations they can hardly detect them .They got like 144 ng benzo[a]pyrene per cigarette converted according to potency equivalency factors (PEFs).
Fron littlewood and fennels toxic study for osha pels………..
All this is in a small sealed room 9×20 and must occur in ONE HOUR.
For Benzo[a]pyrene, 222,000 cigarettes.
They knew the outcome before they did the study…….They used common science to spin another headline is all thats happened…….
They said they gave them 10ug a day………..
1 nanogram equals a billionth of a gram
What does annoy me is the increasingly shrill, banshee screeching from the bansturbators and taxpayer funded leeches
I’m in a similar position to you, being a non-smoker whose parents were carried off due to smoking. However, I agree with the above statement.