Tobacco’s Growing List of Dangers

BY NOW most people know that smoking contributes to lung cancer, heart attack and many other ailments, killing hundreds of thousands of people each year.a “It is by far and away our most serious health problem,” says the director of public education for the Canadian Cancer Society. And the U.S. surgeon general calls smoking “the chief preventable cause of death in our society.”

As if all of this is not bad enough, researchers continue to uncover more and more health hazards caused by smoking. Following are some recent items in tobacco’s growing list of dangers.

● Smokers are more likely to catch the flu during an epidemic and they usually have it worse than nonsmokers, according to a study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. “The risk for all influenza (both mild and severe) increased from 47 percent in nonsmokers to 72 percent in the heavy smokers [more than one pack a day],” says the report. Smokers also lost 20.5 percent more workdays due to the flu. The report says that the difference would have been even greater were it not for the fact that the nonsmokers were often confined to the same smoke-filled rooms as the smokers. Nonsmokers, beware of danger!

● Smoking destroys the vitamin C that a person takes in from food and drink. “One cigarette destroys 25 mg. of vitamin C in the body, which means that 500 mg. are neutralized for every package of cigarettes smoked,” says Richard Lucas in his book Nature’s Medicines. And a report in the American Journal of Digestive Diseases adds that nicotine decreased the ascorbic acid (vitamin C) content of the blood by 24 to 31 percent. Thus smokers are in much greater need of this essential vitamin. “This may explain why those who smoke generally are more prone to infections than those who do not,” says Lucas.

● Smoking poses a “special risk of hearing loss” for “people who work or live in high-noise-level environments,” reports Family Health magazine. Two researchers at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center found that the hearing of smokers who were exposed to loud noise for several minutes “took much longer to return to normal” than that of nonsmokers. But when the smokers desisted from smoking for 12 hours, their hearing recovered almost as quickly. The report in Family Health suggests that “posting ‘No Smoking’ signs and enforcing the rules” would be an effective way to reduce hearing loss in industry.

● Smoking during pregnancy damages fetal arteries, according to a Dutch researcher at Rotterdam University Hospital’s Thoraxcenter. “Severe vessel-wall changes were seen in scanning electron micrographs of umbilical arteries from infants born to women who smoked 10 or more cigarettes a day,” says a report in the magazine Medical World News. The researcher noted that “some of the cells were irregularly shaped, abnormally large, and had very rough fissured surfaces . . . In none of the non-smoking mothers’ umbilical arteries did we see such damage.” A Cornell University professor commented: “That fetal vessels are injured, I think, goes along with what we know about the low birthweights and high incidence of congenital malformations and premature separations among babies of women who smoke.”

● Even “fathers’ smoking may harm fetuses,” reports The New York Times. A study made at Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital/​Case Western Reserve University shows that “when a nonsmoking pregnant woman is exposed to the cigarette smoke of other people [such as the father], the fetal blood contains significant amounts of tobacco smoke by-products.”

● What about infants whose parents smoke? “Because the brain’s barrier to drugs and the liver, which detoxifies nicotine, are less well developed in infants than in adults,” passive smoking is particularly harmful to them, reports Science News magazine. Damages could range from aversion to certain foods, due to nausea caused by tobacco smoke, to sudden infant death syndrome.

● ‘Where there is smoke, there is fire’ is really more than a figure of speech. Nearly one third of the deaths and injuries in residential fires occur in blazes started by smoldering cigarettes, far more than any other single cause, according to the New York City Fire Department. Although at least 2,300 people are killed and 5,800 are injured each year in the United States due to cigarette-related fires, this “health problem” has received little public attention, complains the director of the Burn Council in San Francisco.

With such a continuing flow of health hazards steadily coming to light, it is not surprising that many agencies are protesting the woefully inadequate warnings on cigarette packages and ads. A survey shows that less than 3 percent of the people even notice such warnings, let alone give heed to them. But powerful lobbying by the tobacco industry still has the upper hand. And millions of people around the world continue to succumb to the smoke of what has been called the “most important health issue of our time.”

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