IELTS
JOURNAL
72
The Risks of Cigarette Smoke
Discovered in the early 1800s and named ‘nicotianine’, the oily essence now called
nicotine is the main active ingredient of tobacco. Nicotine, however, is only a small
component of cigarette smoke, which contains more than 4,700 chemical compounds,
including 43 cancer-causing substances.
In recent times, scientific research has been
providing evidence that years of cigarette smoking vastly increases the risk of
developing fatal medical conditions.
In addition to being responsible for more than 85 per cent of lung cancers, smoking is
associated
with cancers of, amongst others, the mouth, stomach and kidneys, and is
thought to cause about 14 per cent of leukaemia and cervical cancers. In 1990,
smoking caused more than 84,000 deaths, mainly resulting from
such problems as
pneumonia, bronchitis and influenza. Smoking, it is believed, is responsible for 30 per
cent of all deaths from cancer and clearly represents the most important preventable
cause of cancer in countries like the United States today.
Passive smoking, the breathing in of the side-stream smoke from the burning of
tobacco between puffs or of the smoke exhaled by a smoker, also causes a serious
health risk. A report published in 1992 by the US Environmental
Protection Agency
(EPA) emphasized the health dangers, especially from side-stream smoke. This type of
smoke contains more smaller particles and is therefore more likely to be deposited
deep in the lungs. On the basis of this report, the EPA has classified environmental
tobacco smoke in the highest risk category for causing cancer.
As an illustration
of the health risks, in the case of a married couple where one partner
is a smoker and one a nonsmoker, the latter is believed to have a 30 per cent higher
risk of death from heart disease because of passive smoking. The risk of lung cancer
also increases over the years of exposure and the figure jumps to 80 per
cent if the
spouse has been smoking four packs a day for 20 years. It has been calculated that 17
per cent of cases of lung cancer can be attributed to high levels of exposure to
secondhand tobacco smoke during childhood and adolescence.
A more recent study by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco
(UCSF) has shown that secondhand cigarette smoke does more harm to nonsmokers
than to smokers. Leaving aside the philosophical question of whether anyone should
have to breathe someone else’s
cigarette smoke, the report suggests that the smoke
experienced by many people in their daily lives is enough to produce substantial
adverse effects on a person’s heart and lungs.
The report, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (AMA), was
based on the researchers’ own earlier research but also includes a review of studies