Re: Humans Raise Risk ... / cancer & smoking

["Bjorn Cedervall" <bcradsafers@HOTMAIL.COM>]

>Weren't cigarette commercials banned from TV in 1971? Didn't the U.S. 

>Surgeon General issue a report as early as 1964?

non scholarly web page that hopefully had these dates correct: 

http://www.tvacres.com/tobacco.htm



---

I recall an article about lungcancer & smoking in Reader's Digest - probably 

from 1964 - can't swear on the year (apology for this type of reference but 

I was a child). The text I believe was written by a professor who had been a 

member of some committee (1961-1962 approx?) which had been asked to go 

through all sorts of data relating to lung cancer and smoking to see if 

there was evidence of a causal relation. The bottom line had been that the 

evidence was clear and overwhelming and that was probably what all members 

of that committee concluded.



Now this particular professor (who wrote in RD, I don' think that it was an 

inteview) was a smoker himself and around 1963 it was found out that he had 

lung cancer himself. What he described was first his own lack of action: 

Here was all the evidence against tobacco and still he continued to smoke. 

He had stopped the smoking immediately as he got the diagnosis - has doctor 

had explained that his general condition was too bad to survive the lung 

surgery.



One may recall that there were at least two important epidemiological 

studies relating to lung cancer and smoking published in 1950. As I had one 

paper about lung cancer (X-rays & DSB repair in different types of cell 

lines) in my thesis I wrote in the first draft (general overview - not for 

the formal publication) some about this historical perspective - and the 

ethical sides - "science and societal responsibility" - of the tobacco world 

- but my science advisor got mad at me for this and forced me to delete that 

part of the text - only about  lines - my full thesis was probably about 200 

pages compact text. It seems to be an endless tragedy - lung cancer deaths 

among women has doubled in Sweden over the last 20 years for instance.



People hunting a few Bq here and there totally lack perspective on what is 

important.



My personal ideas only,



Bjorn Cedervall    bcradsafers@hotmail.com





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