Johns Hopkins study: Fracking may be releasing lung cancer-causing radon

 

fracking

Radon is behind tobacco the No. 2 environmental factor in causing lung cancer. It’s estimated that radon in homes results in 15,000 to 22,000 deaths a year in the U.S.

A disturbing new study from Johns Hopkins University found that radon concentrations in Pennsylvania homes near fracking areas have radon concentrations 39 percent higher than those in non-fracking areas. Great. With all the other negative effects of fracking, ruining people’s wells and water supplies, etc., it also releases a cancer-causing element.

The study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, took more than 2 million radon readings between 1987 and 2013 in 860,000 buildings. Wow, seriously extensive.

The study did not find a direct link between the fracking and radon releases, but it’s a pretty easy conclusion that that link exists — 39 percent increase in radon is eyebrow-raising.

LC-Incidence-by-Sex

We’ve turned a big corner in lung cancer in the U.S. The lung cancer death rate among men have been dropping steadily for 30 years and the death rate for women started to drop (albeit more slowly) about 15 years ago — mostly because far fewer people are smoking obviously. We don’t need more fracking to put a dent in that trend.

 

 

USA TODAY story: Does Big Tobacco desire the marijuana market?

legalweed

I wrote about this a few weeks ago, but here is another article on the same subject from USA Today — the fear that Big Tobacco will take over the legal marijuana business.

Most legal marijuana businesses in Colorado, Washington and Oregon are small mom-and-pop operations. And they are heavily regulated as states are being careful how legal pot is being sold and distributed.

However, it’s already obvious that it must be terribly tempting for Big Tobacco to jump into the burgeoning multi-billion-dollar industry. Its current product — tobacco — is seeing diminishing revenues, at least in the West, thanks to higher taxes, drastically lower smoking rates (from close to 30 percent about 20 years ago to about 18 percent today), the popularity of e-cigs, smoking bans and lots of other factors.

Hah, OK, this quote from the USA Today article cracked me up:

“I think there’s a ton of paranoia that they’re buying up warehouses and signing secret deals,” said Chris Walsh, the editor of Marijuana Business Daily, an industry publication.

However, noted anti-smoking crusader Stanton Glantz recently co-authored a paper that the tobacco industry has had an interest in the marijuana market since the 1970s. And USA Today was nice enough to provide a link to the paper.

According to the paper, published in Milbank Quarterly:

“In many ways, the marijuana market of 2014 resembles the tobacco market before 1880, before cigarettes were mass produced using mechanization and marketed using national brands and modern mass media. Legalizing marijuana opens the market to major corporations, including tobacco companies, which have the financial resources, product design technology to optimize puff-by-puff delivery of a psychoactive drug (nicotine), marketing muscle, and political clout to transform the marijuana market.”

Both Altria and RJ Reynolds deny they are looking to get involved in the marijuana business, but we we know the tobacco industry’s rainbow dashtrack record for honesty, right? Hah! ——>

The head of a company that makes hydroponic equipment for marijuana growing agrees that it appears inevitable that Big Tobacco, and possibly the alcohol industry, will try to muscle in on marijuana as more states legalize it.

“We’re a mass-produced society, from the food we eat to the television we watch,” said President and CEO Derek Peterson of Terra Tech, “ultimately, big alcohol or big tobacco is going to come into this space. I just can’t imagine that won’t happen.”

And with the tobacco industry’s involvement, look for many of the same tricks tobacco used to market cigarettes to kids to market marijuana to underaged users. (Yeah, I know, like marijuana really needs to be marketed to teenagers, but you get my drift. pot_frog E-cig companies have been incredibly — and I mean incredibly — brazen in marketing e-cigs to kids, look for Joe “Rasta” Camel to make a comeback if Big Tobacco gets involved in pot.).

 

Austria to ban smoking in cafes and restaurants

austria
The hills are alive …. with smokefree air…

 

You don’t hear much about smoking bans anymore. Pretty much everywhere that’s going to pass smoking bans has already done it by now.

Austria has apparently been lagging behind the rest of Western Europe. However, it will soon become the latest country to ban smoking in cafes and restaurants.

Austria joins Spain, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy, all of Scandinavia, Hungary, France, the Netherlands and all of the Baltic states in having a nationwide indoor smoking ban. Most of the European countries that don’t have smoking bans are in Eastern Europe, where smoking rates are incredibly high.

The Austrian Chamber of Commerce announced it plans to appeal the ban, which won’t go into effect until 2018. Cafe owners who implement the ban in 2016 will receive compensation from the Austrian government to make up for possible losses in revenues.

A far-right party called the Freedom Party, said it would get rid of the law if it wins parliamentary elections. (Nothing sends a chill down the spine quite like “far right” and “Austria” in the same sentence.)

 

Smoking makes superbugs like MRSA harder to kill

MRSA

In case you didn’t need any more reasons to quit smoking. A study from the University of California, San Diego suggests that cigarette smoke makes that nasty and stubborn MRSA bacteria tougher to kill through a variety of means. (And trust me, it really sucked to look at some of the pictures when I went looking for MRSA images. Yuck… I didn’t need to see that before dinner.)

This is kind of technical, so I am just going to quote from the article rather than try to explain it myself:

               “We already know that smoking cigarettes harms human respiratory and immune cells, and now we’ve shown that, on the flipside, smoke can also stress out invasive bacteria and make them more aggressive,” said Dr. Laura E. Crotty Alexander of UC San Diego and the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System.

Macrophages, or immune cells known to devour infectious ages, were infected with both types of MRSA (smoke exposed and not) to test the immune response. Although both were able to take up the populations of MRSA, macrophages fighting MRSA exposed to cigarette smoke extract had a significantly harder time killing them.

Researchers found that this type of MRSA was more resistant to the reactive oxygen species, a chemical burst macrophages utilize once they have engulfed bacteria. MRSA exposed to smoke extract was also more resistant to antimicrobial peptides, another line of immune defense used to make holes in bacteria and cause inflammation. Even more alarming was researchers’ discovery that MRSA was able to adhere better to human cells when treated with smoke, assisting in the success of their invasion. This effect depended strongly on dose; the more smoke extract the MRSA was exposed to, the more resistant it became.

Get this, not only does cigarette smoke have this effect … so do e-cigs. From the article:

Another study conducted by researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine a year earlier suggested something similar with e-cigarette smoke; vaporized smoke can also alter the structure of MRSA’s cell wall to make it more resistant to bacteria. However, this research also discovered that surface changes to the bacteria increased 10 times more with exposure to cigarette smoke rather than e-cigarette vapor.

Study: Kids’ exposure to secondhand smoke raises danger of heart disease as adults

smoking

A study recently released out of Finland suggests that secondhand smoke not only damages lung health around kids, it damages their circulatory system to the point of raising the risk of heart disease when they are adults.

What researchers found in this 20-year study is that kids exposed to nicotine from their parents’ smoking tend to have an added build-up of carotid plaque in their blood vessels as adults — the kind of plaque that causes heart disease.

Just more fuel to the fire about the damage down by secondhand smoke, especially to kids. Secondhand smoke has been shown to cause and worsen lung and bronchial infections, aggravate asthma, cause ear infections among children and even increase the risk of sudden-death syndrome. There are still people claiming secondhand smoke doesn’t kill or even harm anyone (Libertarian stooge John Stossel comes to mind), but those voices have grown more and more quiet over the past 10 years since I’ve been involved in the tobacco control debate. They were pretty loud ten years ago, but nobody listens to them anymore, just like most everyone stopped listening 30 years ago to those people still trying to claim smoking didn’t give smokers lung cancer.

Heart disease and blood vessel plaque buildup … you can add to the afflictions caused by secondhand smoke.

I once did a little math exercise that really scared me. You’re going to find this number hard to believe, but bare with me … it is a shocking number.

I estimate that for the first 16 years of my life, my parents smoked between them roughly five to six packs a day. To be conservative, let’s call that 100 cigarettes a day. Say, I was exposed to their smoking for 8 hours of the day — one-third of that 100 — that’s 33 cigarettes a day. Say, I actually ingested 10 percent of their smoke into my lungs — that’s 3.3 cigarettes a day.

That’s 3.3 cigarettes a day, 365 days a year, for 16+ years. That comes out to the equivalent of roughly 20,000 cigarettes. So I estimate that just from my parents alone, not counting my brother and sister who smoked, not counting all of my parents’ friends who smoked — and they pretty much all did — I breathed in the equivalent smoke of 20,000 cigarettes from the time I was a baby in a crib to until I was  16. My dad died when I was 16, so that number probably dropped off afterward. 20,000 cigarettes in my still developing lungs. No wonder I had such bad bronchitis as a teenager, no wonder I had chronic problems with bronchitis until I turned 30.

And now it makes me wonder whether it’s going to catch up with me with heart disease. I’ve already had one circulatory system scare.

I’m not bitter or angry at my parents about it and I hope I don’t come off like a whiner — it’s just that that 20,000 figure continues to blow me away. They didn’t know (though, without trying to sound bitter about it, I will always wonder why the thought never seemed to cross their minds that all that smoke might not be good for their kids. My mom loves to tell a story about how they had to leave Canada because it was so cold and her husband and my brother had pneumonia because of the cold. Cold weather doesn’t cause pneumonia. I have to bite my tongue every time she tells that story, because I want to say to her, “Mom, it wasn’t the cold weather that was giving dad and the kids pneumonia, it was probably the cigarettes more than anything …” But, to keep the peace, I never come out and say that.)

Anyway, most smokers know better today. I wish 100 percent of smokers knew better, but I still shake my head at the nitwits who in this day and age still smoke around kids. I bend over backward not to pass judgement on smokers, except when I see people smoking in a car with kids or otherwise blowing smoke in kids’ faces. Then I have a hard time not glaring.