Which is worse: Cigars or Cigarettes

NoTime

Cars produce carbon monoxide.
If you're in a closed garage with the engine running you'll be dead in 20 minutes or so. Catalytic converter or not.
Carcinogens, how about MTBA a component of auto fuel?
Now ubiquitous throughout the environment.
You get some in all the food you eat and water you drink, no matter where you live.
There are lots of other things going on here as well, like PM10.

Studies involving 40,000 to 50,000 people can't show an effect of secondhand smoke greater than the error bars of the study.
I just can't find it in me to share your concern.

The thing is that if they had spent the billions of dollars, used on trying to persuade people to stop smoking, on basic biochemical research, you might now have real cures for cancer, heart disease or just getting old.

Loren Booda

If you can smell someone's tobacco smoke a half mile down the highway, just think of what it's doing to the smoker's lungs!

I think it pompous and rude for people to smoke (especially cigars) in an enclosed area with other patrons. How many people would actually be smoking, in light of its extreme hazards, if it were not addicting?

daveb

Not to mention the fact that tobacco is radioactive and delivers a healthy dose of alpha radiation from the Po-210 and Pb-210 to the lungs over time.

NoTime

I think people are missing my point.
I'm complaining about the narrow focus.
This whole business strikes me as whining about the person who spilled their drink on you while the tsunami is crashing down.

Here is something to think about
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060819/fob3.asp

I can for sure smell that diesel truck a half mile ahead of me, can't say the same for a smoker.

If a coal fired power plant had to conform to the same radiation requirements as a nuclear power plant they would all get shut down.

verty

Isn't tobacco a plant? How does it become radioactive?

DaveC426913

I'm not about to add credence to the claim that tobacco is radioactive, but you should realize that radioactivity is a normal prcoess that organisms can pick up from selectively ingesting the contents of their surroundings. In fact, radio carbon dating is exists because of the preferential uptake of slightly radioactive carbon (it doesn't mean it glows, it means the particles decay over weeks, years, centuries). Likewise, your basement might be slightly radioactive because the ground around you tends to leak radon gas.


"To grow what the tobacco industry calls "more flavorful" tobacco, US farmers use high-phosphate fertilizers. The phosphate is taken from a rock mineral, apatite, that is ground into powder, dissolved in acid and further processed. Apatite rock also contains radium, and the radioactive elements lead 210 and polonium 210. "

Loren Booda

Radon inhalation is the second greatest source of lung cancer, next to cigarettes. It is present in many basements.