Cigarettes Might Be Infectious
Janet Raloff writes in Science News:
The tobacco in cigarettes hosts a bacterial bonanza — literally hundreds of different germs, including those responsible for many human illnesses, a new study finds.
“Nearly every paper that you pick up discussing the health effects of cigarettes starts out with something to the effect that smokers and people exposed to secondhand smoke experience high rates of respiratory infections,” notes Amy Sapkota of the University of Maryland, College Park. The presumption has been that smoking renders people vulnerable to disease by impairing lung function or immunity. And it may well do both.
“But nobody talks about cigarettes as a source of those infections,” she says. Her new data now suggest that’s distinctly possible.
If these germs are alive, something she has not yet confirmed, just handling cigarettes or putting an unlit one to the mouth could be enough to cause an infection.
Read More: Science News
…
Quitting cigarettes increases diabetes risk
Here’s the perfect excuse to back out of your new year’s resolution.
from newscientist.com
For smokers under pressure to give up in 2010, it will seem like the ultimate excuse: quitting smoking appears to increase the risk of diabetes.
Smokers are on average 30 per cent more likely than non-smokers to develop type 2 or adult-onset diabetes. Now a study of 10,892 adults over 10 years has found that, in the first six years after giving up, former smokers are 70 per cent more likely than non-smokers to develop the disease.
Hsin-Chieh Yeh and colleagues at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, found that the risk of diabetes is highest straight after quitting and gradually reduces to that of non-smokers. This is most likely because quitting makes people more likely to put on weight, which is known to increase the risk of diabetes.
The results shouldn’t discourage people from quitting, but former smokers should gradually increase the amount of exercise they do, suggests Martin Dockrell of the UK anti-smoking charity ASH.
Journal reference: Annals of Internal Medicine, vol 152, p 10
Why Are More Americans Smoking?
Surprising news from the Centers for Disease Control, reported in U.S. News & World Report:
After decades of progress, the number of Americans who smoke hasn’t budged over the last five years and actually rose slightly from 2007 to 2008, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Over the longer term, smoking rates have declined. From 1998 to 2008, the percentage of smokers in the United States dropped from 24.1 to 20.6 percent.
However, the report notes that “during the past five years, rates have shown virtually no change,” and in fact the percentage of Americans who smoke has begun to creep up again, rising from 19.8 percent in 2007 to 20.6 percent in 2008.
Many experts blame the turnaround on recent cutbacks in funding for state tobacco-control programs, which had proven successful.
“Tobacco is the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S., and we know what…
