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Smoking Is Even Deadlier Than Previously Thought
HughPickens.com writes Who still smokes?" as Denise Grady reports at the NYT that however bad you thought smoking was, it's even worse. A new study has found that in addition to the well-known hazards of lung cancer, artery disease, heart attacks, chronic lung disease and stroke, researchers found that smoking was linked to significantly increased risks of infection, kidney disease, intestinal disease caused by inadequate blood flow, and heart and lung ailments not previously attributed to tobacco. "The smoking epidemic is still ongoing, and there is a need to evaluate how smoking is hurting us as a society, to support clinicians and policy making in public health," says Brian D. Carter, an author of the study. "It's not a done story." Carter says he was inspired to dig deeper into the causes of death in smokers after taking an initial look at data from five large health surveys being conducted by other researchers. As expected, death rates were higher among the smokers but diseases known to be caused by tobacco accounted for only 83 percent of the excess deaths in people who smoked. "I thought, 'Wow, that's really low,' " Mr. Carter said. "We have this huge cohort. Let's get into the weeds, cast a wide net and see what is killing smokers that we don't already know." The researchers found that, compared with people who had never smoked, smokers were about twice as likely to die from infections, kidney disease, respiratory ailments not previously linked to tobacco, and hypertensive heart disease, in which high blood pressure leads to heart failure. "The Surgeon General's report claims 480,000 deaths directly caused by smoking, but we think that is really quite a bit off," concludes Carter adding that the figure may be closer to 540,000.
If it is so bad then why not ban tobacco? The problem with tobacco is that it is so widely available, making getting off the stuff so hard. I certainly would not visit a dealer to get illegal baccy.
The reality is that governments are addicted to the tax income. 11 billion a year in Australia.
Don't waste your time on tobacco when there's medicinal herb with much better health benefits and much better side effects too!
Smokers already pay a higher premium, numbnuts. And if you want a law change to mandate pricing on people's behavior, then it better include clauses for alcohol consumption, unprotected sex and not praying. Because there are plenty of peer-reviewed studies that show those affect health in a negative fashion too.
Now, if you read what I just wrote and said to yourself, "yeah, that makes sense" then I've got a shiny 12" dildo you can shove up your self-righteous ass.
Wrong question. The question should be "Who wants others to live forever?" Because that's the actual problem we're facing today: We're getting too old. It would be less of a problem if we got old and stayed healthy (it would still be one, but a lesser one), but we get old and spend the last decade or so as dependents, some even longer than that. If you now factor in childhood, you get about 30 years of lifetime per person where people are a burden rather than a boon for society. That's a third of a person's life, if we're really generous. The half of it if we feel less generous.
That's not going to work out, people. What we used to have is people who needed 15-20 years of nurturing and education, then spent about 40 years productively and maybe had 5 or 10 years left where they were more or less healthy enough to at least be no burden (or if they were we had those funky 50s style ataractics that kept feisty gramps in a stupor 'til he finally croaked). Today we keep our kids unproductive 'til they are well into their 20s (because of the all important college education the cost of which you'll never in this or any lifetime recover), work 'til they're like 60 (if that) and then spend another 20-30 years dependent on drugs and care. Fuck that "half your lifetime being productive if you're not generous", it's half your lifetime that you're productive if you are generously speaking.
And you want people to stop smoking? To stop drinking? To eat healthy? Fuck that! Let them smoke, snort, shoot and gobble down anything they want. The less healthy, the better! Yes, terminal lung cancer is quite care intensive, but it's terminal! It's one year of intensive care instead of 10+ years of hogging that respirator.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And what is productivity? Are you productive if you work in an office selling insurance? Or writing software used by people in other offices to support people in yet further offices? When we talk about leading a productive life we don't tend to think of that in terms of worker productivity. I don't know how that relates to the above posts, but it doesn't make me feel that happy.