Something For Everyone . . .

Tobacco has a big secret.  Don’t tell anyone.

When research scientists add up the risk factors from all the chemical ingredients in tobacco, they’re way below the number of actual deaths from smoking.

Statistically, the chemicals in tobacco are far less dangerous than we think.

The numbers don’t add up. They’re not even close.

When you plug in Tobacco’s Big Secret, suddenly all the risk vs. death numbers match up.

The secret?   Tobacco smoke is radioactive.

It’s true.  Google it, or look it up on Wikipedia.

Since the late 1930′s, the tobacco industry has been using a really cheap fertilizer made from the mineral apatite (pronounced just like appetite) that gives tobacco a ‘sweet’ taste (their description, not mine).

Unfortunately, apatite in its natural form has uranium, radioactive polonium, radioactive radon, radioactive lead, radioactive bismuth, and a lot more nasty radioactive stuff all mixed inside.

Apatite is radioactive.

. . . . . . It's cheap, it's tasty, it's "hot"

Apatite is mined, crushed, processed into a phosphate fertilizer, then applied to the soil in tobacco fields. The radioactive pieces break free, hitch a ride on air currents and bits of dust, then get stuck on the gooey hairs and leaves of the plant. Each year, adding more fertilizer makes the soil — and the plants — even more radioactive.

But remember, it’s cheap and makes the final product taste ‘sweet’  ( YUCK ! )  so they’ll never want to stop using it.

The radioactive chunks stay stuck on through the manufacturing process and are freed when the tobacco is burned. Burning does not “clean” the radioactive particles, it just spreads them into the air.

The smoker inhales this witch’s brew of varied radioactive particles. Many get glued to the lung tissue by the tar in the smoke and start damaging tissue right away, while others take minutes, days, months or years to cause their damage.  Some are exhaled and combine with the smoke from the cigarette’s burning end to mix with other second-hand smoke that spreads around the area.  The entire area becomes mildly radioactive.

Yep, second-hand smoke is radioactive, too.  That’s the actual reason it’s so harmful.

The pieces that remain in the lungs bombard internal organs with nuclear particles long after death.  The damage from each radioactive molecule is small, but they’re cumulative. Each day is a little worse than the day before.

How much atomic radiation are we talking about? An op-ed piece in the New York Times in late 2006 tried to flesh out some numbers.

Some scientists try to compare the tissue damage from cigarettes to that caused by a chest X-ray, though they’re not exactly the same kind of damage (one is a ray, this one is a particle that has actual mass and volume and causes far more tissue damage).  Older studies get much lower numbers by comparing 1980′s-style X-ray machines, so some old studies quote 300 chest X-rays per year, while others compare 2,000 “modern” chest X-rays each year to a pack-a-day smoker.  Modern digital X-ray machines use even less radiation, so comparisons today would be even higher.

You can read some facts at the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) website on Radiation in Tobacco and Radiation Protection – Tobacco Smoke (intended to protect workers whose jobs involve radioactive specimens) or you can Google the topic and learn more. This would make a great science project for students of any age.

Check out this United States National Institutes of Health NIH.gov training page .  The National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements has a web page too.  They list a chest X-ray at 8 mrem, a year’s worth of average exposure to ordinary stuff like bricks, radon in the basement, air travel (cosmic rays), etc., at 360 mrem (or about 1 mrem each day), and a year of pack-and-a-half a day smoking at 16,000 mrem.

Those figures put less than 1 cigarette per day at more than all the other background radiation we all get. But the radiation from tobacco smoke is the worst kind of all for tissue damage.  Alpha particles are pieces of actual matter (instead of a ray of energy) made up of 2 neutrons and 2 protons that bang physically into our own tissue.  It’s literally having nucleii blasting into your body about 1/8 of an inch deep, at the speed of light.  Repeat forever.  Other nuclear events, beta rays and gamma rays, take their turns, too, but the alpha particles do the bulk of the damage.

Even worse, since it creams delicate internal tissues instead of the top (dead) layer of skin, it’s much deadlier than simple background radiation.

Your body tries to heal itself, but it has limits.  Damage is spread through the entire body by the bloodstream, so healing is difficult and, eventually, impossible.

When the radiation risk factor is added to the chemical risk factors, the death numbers finally add up.

Bonus: It turns out that people are about 20 times more likely to die from lung cancer today than they were before apatite was used for fertilizer, in spite of much lower smoking rates and tremendous improvements in medical care.  Now that’s progress.

While smoking rates went down . . .

The entire PowerPoint presentation from the American Cancer Society can be downloaded from http://www.cancer.org/downloads/PRO/Cancer Statistics 2004.ppt

The story goes that U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop tried to warn the public of all this 20 years ago in a televised message, but went largely unheard.  Unfortunately, I can’t find any evidence that he ever said that.  Maybe this industry does a really good job of burying things.

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By the way, in the U.S.,

smoking kills about 1 in every 5 people,

about the same percentage that smokes (20% of the U.S. population). Does anyone else see a pattern here? It sounds like everyone who smokes dies of a smoking-related illness.  Smokers live about 12 to 15 years less than non-smokers, and many of those years are very unpleasant.

Every year, nearly a half-million people in the U.S. die from smoking. On average, that’s about 10,000 people from each state. About 1.2 million die annually in Europe (and their package warning labels put ours to shame. Canada has strong anti-smoking labels with graphic photos.) Worldwide, smoking causes one death every 8 seconds.

Smoking-induced diseases like cancer, heart disease, emphysema, stroke, etc., kill more people than the next 6 causes — alcohol, cars, suicide, AIDS, homicide, and illegal drugs — combined.

And I was just joking about, “Don’t tell anyone.”

Tell everybody. Cigarette smoke is radioactive, and that’s what does the damage.

So, why haven’t you heard this anywhere else?  There are two schools of thought . . .

First is that if people found out that low levels of radioactivity were harmful, they’d get upset about nuclear power plants.  The distinction about “radioactive particles selectively bombarding internal organs” compared with “random rays hitting dead skin that soon sloughs off” would be difficult to pack into a 30-second commercial.  Nuclear power plants would get a bad name, even though their emissions are actually much lower than those from a cigarette and a different kind of radioactivity.  That’s right; you get far more radiation (and a much worse kind) from smoking than you would living downwind from a nuclear power plant, and it lands and sticks in a much worse place in your body.

The second idea is that the tobacco companies have an awful lot of money, are not known for playing fair or telling the truth, and wouldn’t hesitate to squash anyone that tried to bring them down.

Pick one.

Charlie Gosh

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