Radioactive Smoke
by Brianna Rego
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- In November 2006 former kgb operative alexander Litvinenko died in a London hospital in what had all the hallmarks of a cold war–style assassination.
- The poison that killed him, a rare radioactive isotope called polonium 210, is far more widespread than many of us realize.
- People worldwide smoke almost six trillion cigarettes a year, and each one delivers a small amount of polonium 210 to the lungs.
- The poison builds up to the equivalent radiation dosage of 300 chest x-rays a year for a person who smokes one and a half packs a day.
- Polonium has cause thousands of deaths a year in the U.S. alone.
- By searching through internal tobacco industry documents, I have discovered that manufacturers even devised processes that would dramatically cut down the isotope’s concentrations in ciga- rette smoke. But Big Tobacco consciously decided to do nothing and to keep its research secret.
- In June 2009 President Barack Obama signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act into law.
- Forcing the industry to finally remove polonium from cigarette smoke would be one of the most straightforward ways to start making cigarettes less deadly.
- Radio-chemist Vilma R. Hunt discovered that there are no signs of polonium in cigarette ash because at temperatures of smoldering tobacco, polonium turns into vapor, meaning that the missing polonium goes up and smoke; smokers inhale it directly into their lungs
- Some powerful carcinogens found in cigarette smoke are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and
- It estimates that 1.3 million people die of lung cancer worldwide every year, 90 percent because of smoking
- If polonium was reduced, it could save a lot of people's lives
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