Tobacco’s Menace to Smokers and Nonsmokers

Evidence of tobacco’s harm to smokers and nonsmokers continues to mount. Consider the following:

■ Tobacco Instead of Food

“An epidemic of lung cancer can be predicted” for many developing countries within a decade, says the journal World Health. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization adds that tobacco consumption “continues to rise by 2.1 per cent a year in the Third World.” Presently, 63 percent of the world’s tobacco is grown there, up from 50 percent some 25 years ago. This trend endangers these developing countries. The Times of London explains how: “Tobacco production, adopted throughout the Third World as a cash crop, is raising cancer rates, causing deforestation and occupying land that could grow much needed food crops for home consumption.”

■ Smoke and Cancer

In 1986, at the 14th International Cancer Congress in Hungary, experts estimated that 3,500,000 people would die of cancer that year. “According to WHO [World Health Organization] statistics,” reports the German medical journal Ärztliche Praxis, “one million of these deaths will be caused by smoking.”

Sir Richard Doll, emeritus professor of medicine at Oxford University, warned that of the 3,800 chemicals in tobacco smoke, 50 have been identified as causing cancer in animals. Some of these chemicals were found to be most concentrated in noninhaled smoke. Smokers thus expose others, who become passive smokers, to the more carcinogenic substances. A British study of nonsmokers living with smokers found that every second person killed by lung cancer was a passive smoker.

The surgeon general of the United States urged companies to provide a smoke-free workplace for nonsmokers. In his report for 1986 on the health effects of smoking, he said: “Involuntary smoking is a cause of disease, including cancer, in healthy nonsmokers,” and “simple separation of smokers and nonsmokers within the same airspace may reduce, but does not eliminate, exposure of nonsmokers to environmental tobacco smoke.”

■ Unborn Affected

A medical research team from the University of Sydney in Australia claims that smoking starves babies in the womb of needed nutrients. The researchers have been studying the effect smoking has on the flow of blood to the placenta​—the organ that supplies the unborn baby with food and oxygen and carries away waste via the umbilical cord. When the researchers monitored the blood flow through the umbilical cord, they discovered that just two minutes after a mother smokes a cigarette, the blood flow is slowed, and such an effect lasts for up to an hour.

Dr. Brian Trudinger, senior lecturer in obstetrics and gynecology, said, as reported in The University of Sydney News: “On average, the babies of mothers who smoke ten cigarettes a day throughout pregnancy weigh about 300 grams [10 ounces] less at birth than those of nonsmokers. But until now it could be argued that this was due in some way to the smoker rather than the smoking​—that the sort of woman who smoked in pregnancy may have had other problems which resulted in smaller babies. However, our research shows conclusively that smoking affects the foetus directly by reducing the blood flow from it to the placenta.”

Also, the British medical magazine The Lancet recently published the results of a study of childhood cancer. The study found that the more cigarettes smoked per day by the mother during pregnancy the greater the cancer risk in her offspring. “When all tumour sites were considered,” The Lancet reported, “the overall risk for cancer in children exposed to 10 or more cigarettes per day during pregnancy increased by 50%.”

After they are born, children of smokers face additional health dangers. In another issue, The Lancet noted: “Studies have found a direct relation between passive smoking and childhood asthma, persistent wheezing, and respiratory illness in the first and second years of life.”

■ Smoking Costs at Workplace

Smokers cost their employers an extra $4,000 ($2,650, U.S.) per person per year, states the New South Wales Health Surveyors’ Association in Australia. The association bases its claim on evidence that smokers are away from work sick more than nonsmokers and have about twice as many accidents. Accidents are more likely among smokers, says the association, because of smoke in the workers’ eyes or because smokers are using one hand to perform tasks while the other is holding a cigarette.