If you thought all the revelations about the harmful effects of cigarettes and allegation that tobacco companies hid damaging information from the public were over, think again. Here’s an even bigger shocker, from ABC News:
Tobacco companies knew that cigarettes contained a radioactive substance called polonium-210, but hid that knowledge from the public for over four decades, a new study of historical documents revealed.
Scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles, reviewed 27 previously unanalyzed documents and found that tobacco companies knew about the radioactive content of cigarettes as early as 1959. The companies studied the polonium throughout the 1960s, knew that it caused “cancerous growths” in the lungs of smokers, and even calculated how much radiation a regular smoker would ingest over 20 years. Then, they kept that data secret.
Hrayr Karagueuzian, the study’s lead author, said the companies’ level of deception surprised him.
“They not only knew of the presence of polonium, but also of its potential to cause cancer,” he said.
Karagueuzian and his team replicated the calculations that tobacco company scientists described in these documents and found that the levels of radiation in cigarettes would account for up to 138 deaths for every 1,000 smokers over a period of 25 years.
The study published online in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research.
Cheryl Healton, is the CEO of the American Legacy Foundation, the organization created from the 1998 legal settlement against tobacco companies. She said the knowledge that cigarettes contain radiation is disturbing today, but would have been even more unsettling to Americans in the midst of the Cold War-mindset of the 1950s and 1960s.
“This was when we were crawling under our desks during school radiation drills and thinking about building bomb shelters in our backyards,” Healton said. “You probably could not imagine a more ideal time where you would have maximized the impact of that information. Unquestionably, this fact would have reduced smoking if it had been publicized.”
She added that most Americans are probably still unaware that cigarettes contain radiation.
Polonium-210 is a radioactive material that emits hazardous particles called alpha particles. There are low levels of it in the soil and the atmosphere, but the fertilizer used to grow tobacco plants contributes to the levels of polonium found in cigarettes.
Almost everyone who’s a Baby Boomer knows someone who has died of cancer who was a heavy smoker. My father Richard Gandelman died a few years ago. He had been a heavy smoker, kicked it towards the end of his life, but his lungs did him in at t end end even though he had warded off or was living with in remission many other aliments. My aunt Mickey Friedman (his sister) died last winter. Her heart went out after a long, painful struggle with respiratory ailments. She told me she felt although there was some asthma in the family, the cigarettes she had smoked earlier in her life had gravely damaged her lungs. I know several people (including a relative) who still smoke, spend tons of money on cigarettes and cough all the time. One has a heart problem.
And there are many more.
So the question becomes: how many more?
How many revelations will it take?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.