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Article in Toledo Blade: Michael Woods: Cigarette will deliverdose of radiation too
RADSAFER's -
Please see the article below from today's version of the Toledo Blade.
Back when I smoked (yeah, I'm ashamed of it, but I did) one of my staff and I used to exhale smoke into a running RADECO air sampler during radiation monitor training to demonstrate to the FMT's how elevated readings would appear. It was very easy to get 200-300 net cpm with a pancake probe (HP-210 or equivalent) with only a 2-3 minute run time ... and 2 Marlboro lights <grin>
Jim Hardeman
Jim_Hardeman@mail.dnr.state.ga.us
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Michael Woods: Cigarette will deliver dose of radiation too
May 1, 2000
In the late 1960s and 1970s, Dr. Dade W. Moeller, an expert on radiation and professor at the Harvard University School of Public Health, urged cigarette manufacturers to take what may seem like a strange step:
Get the radiation out of tobacco.
Please develop a process to remove radioactive material from cigarettes. It could protect the lungs of cigarette smokers from enormous doses of radioactive material found in tobacco. It could make cigarette smoking safer by reducing the risks of lung cancer.
"Their response was that people did not know that cigarettes contain radioactive materials and all that any such efforts would be to call this to their attention," Dr. Moeller recalled.
Radioactive material in cigarettes? Most people still aren't aware of the nasty secret. Mention radiation exposure from cigarettes and they think it's some heavy-handed trick concocted by the anti-cigarette lobby to scare smokers and potential smokers.
Dr. Moeller and his Harvard associates, however, regard the radiation hazard as both a serious health threat and a public health opportunity.
The threat, they say is serious enough to add a new warning label to those routinely put on cigarette packages. The radiation label would caution: "Surgeon General's Warning: Cigarettes are a Major Source of Radiation Exposure."
Given the public's morbid fear of radiation, knowledge about cigarette radiation could boost the effectiveness of anti-smoking programs.
Here's the situation in brief. It has been documented over the last 35 years in reports in scientific journals and publications of the congressionally chartered National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement:
In a 1964 report in "Science," Harvard scientists announced discovery that tobacco contains relatively high concentrations of a natural radioactive material called polonium-210 (Po-210). It forms from a natural radioactive gas, radon. Radon forms from another natural radioactive material, uranium, found in small amounts in soil.
Po-210 is a solid, dust-like material that sticks to the leaves of tobacco plants. It remains in tobacco during the manufacture of cigarettes. When a smoker lights up, the solid Po-210 changes into a gas, and is inhaled into the smoker's lungs.
Scientists have found that Po-210 deposits itself into small areas of the lung called bifurcations of the bronchial epithelia. Interestingly, that's exactly the area where lung cancer usually starts.
Those areas thus get a big jolt of radiation. Consider the yearly dose to the bronchial epithelium in a person who smokes 11/2 packs of cigarettes daily: It's equivalent to the radiation in about 1,500 chest x-ray examinations, according to Dr. Moeller and his associates.
The annual radiation dose to a 11/2 -pack per day smoker is more than 12 times higher than the safe limits set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the U.S. Department of Energy. It is 1,500 times the dose that the NRC permits to the lungs of people who live just outside the perimeter fence of a nuclear power plant.
Although scientists have no direct proof, they assume that the radiation dose in these small areas of lung tissue cause, or play a big part in, lung cancer.
Pity the nonsmokers unfortunate enough to live, work, or dine near cigarette smokers. They also get a nice stiff dose of radiation from inhaling "second-hand" smoke from smoldering cigarette butts and exhaled smoke.
Smokers and nonsmokers exposed to second-hand smoke should know about the radiation hazard from cigarettes. Cigarette companies should heed Dr. Moeller's advice, and develop ways of removing polonium-210 from tobacco.
Maybe they should list radiation content on the package, right along with nicotine and "tar" levels, so smokers can be more informed consumers, and pick a low-radiation brand.
Michael Woods is The Blade's science editor.
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