Increase in lung cancer

...or is the cannabis article also as far fetched as everything else we read?

You may very well be correct, when it comes to tobacco, alcohol and drugs, most written things to read will be biased in one way or another.

I think there is an important correlation between lung cancer & carbon monoxide. Of course, smoking does increase CO levels. But these have increased systematically for decades. CO would also increase other cancers of course - bladder for example. Instead of a hose pipe in the car window, we're doing it slowly. The world that is. Us smokers are just going down with a smile on our faces.

Yet another delightful hypothesis...

I have heard before that lung cancer is not decreasing, but I have a question. Is it the rate (as a percentage of the population getting ill) that is going up, or the total number of cases? There is a difference; The population is growing, so if the total number of cases was going up, it could merely be a reflection of increased total population, even if the percentage rate was dropping a little. On the other hand, if the percentage of the population getting lung cancer is steady or going up, despite a lower percentage of smokers, that would indicate other causes (such as air pollution, etc.) are driving it. Just wondering.

I have heard news reports that lung cancer is more common in women who do not smoke than in men. My wife is an example. She never smoked. One lung lobe of four was removed. She is a survivor for two and a half years going on the magic number "5" years and counting.

Lung cancer can be caused by exposure to caustic chemicals, not just second hand smoke. In my wife's case her first twenty year marriage was to a chain cig smoker. Maybe that is where it came from. Nobody knows.

I would be willing to bet that sitting in a traffic jam on the freeway is far worse than sitting in a room with second hand smoke...and perhaps as bad as smoking cigarettes for the overall health of your lungs...I remember reading when I was in Uni. at USC (Southern California)...that the air in LA held more toxins than what are found in cigarette smoke...

I would bet that our air quality has a lot more to do with it than anything else...

Cheers,

Josh

For the last more than 20 years the absolute number of smokers (in USA) goes down while rates of cancers go up. The trends are completely opposite.

I wrote about this in a different thread. According to 20 years lag people expected to see decline of cancers (rates) starting 2000. Didn't happen. Hence the hysteria around the second-hand smoking. Sometimes one can hear the claims that this is because the previous generations were smokers or were subjected to SHS, which is total BS. I see this as a crisis of the anti-smoking campaign. I would expect it to be recognized upstairs in four-five years. After that smoking will be forever at whatever state it will be by that time.

Tobacco smoking has existed for hundreds and hundreds of years. Cases of lung cancer were extremely rare as late as the early 1900's. It's argued that the increase of cigarette smoking lead to the dramatic increase in lung cancer. With new cases of lung cancer increasing, but fewer and fewer smokers lighting up, now it's argued it's SHS? Isn't it a bit foolish for medical science to place the brunt of the blame on tobacco use?

Have any serious studies been conducted into other potential causes of lung cancer, like the things other posters have mentioned-asphalt in roads, air pollution, CO levels? They would be interesting to read about.

With invention of the efficient cigarette making machine the number of smokers blew up drastically. Soon it was noticed that as drastically the rate of cancer related deaths jumps up. Most likely I am inaccurate here and hopefully I'll be corrected. Two jumps were separated by 20 years delay and it was established in multiple studies.

In 50-70s there were a lot of studies pushing forward the connection between smoking and cancers. Established statistical relation seemed to be robust but I've heard that while it was possible to promote cancer by injection some stuff (I don't remember, tars, nicotine, whatever) into rats simple inhaling did not lead to cancer. In other words, I think one can say that no microscopic relation between smoking and cancer is found.

Of course, cancer studies are one of the most massive and I don't think people concentrate exclusively on smoking. It's still science after all and the number of research groups is huge and not all of them are incompetent. Sad luck was that the number of smokers increased so fast and gave the chance to see what kind of diseases will kick in as well.

would not support doing studies on the effects of radioactive fallout from atomic, nuclear weapons as they would be held responsible. Much better to have the Surgeon General promote a witch hunt and cast the blame elsewhere. Just think, billions of little bits of radioactive particles floating through the air, landing here and there only to continually be blown about until they are somehow consumed or inhaled. Yes, all this shit out there with a half life of 24,000 years.

Howard Moore was an observer of many atomic explosions and guess what *did him in* Second Hand Smoke is just a bunch of horse shit what really stinks is the lack of medical research against the real problem when all the money is being flushed down the toilet on what will eventually become known as the biggest hoax ever portrayed.

If the relation between any environmental factor and health is strong and simple it would be found in no time. It's not a stem cell research, there is no need for a government funding for that.

Statistics is a subtle thing. It should be considered as a way to visualize a bunch of data but instead it is often considered as a proof of existence of a causal relation. I've seen some statistical studies, which practically showed the dependence of the radiative decay rate on the menstrual cycle of women working in the lab. For fun some guys showed correlations between stork population in Germany and fertility rates and so on.

just a thought...

Well, individual smokers are easy, I mean, you can take large groups of ppl, these should come from the same environment, with the only difference the one in smoking habits. then you might se the trends, the ppl smoking has a higher / lower likelyhood of developing lung cancer.

But when it comes to passive smoking... how to select these groups of people? especially in the older days, when ppl used to smoke practically everywhere... And the second hand smoke alarm reports are the reason one cannot smoke in bars etc anymore... not the other way around, that the correlation could be measured after the smoke ban was in place... that thing will take at least 20 years to show.

The noise mentioned in the subject line are all other sources of cancer inducing chemicals/particals/gases/matter that a modern man come in contact with. perhaps we all could smoke if all the other sources where set to nil...

This is exactly one of the line of criticism of the celebrated California study, which showed no relation between mortality and SHS. This is why this study had almost no impact on the anti-SHS campaign.

Since smoking is on the decline, the increase must occur from other factors. I personally think that the atomic age is much to blame. In my area of the USA (Pittsburgh) we had the first atomic electric plant in Shippingport, about 30 miles away. The towns in that area are a hotbed of cancer. People lived less than a mile from the plant. I remember as a young boy, on local newscasts, comment was made about testing of milk for radiation, and safe levels. I had CBR training in the US Army (1970's), and remember two things about radiation contamination: It never completely goes away and there is no absolute safe level.

In the 50's and 60's, between the Cold War nations doing God knows what, and an absence or disregard of knowledge of long term effects, I feel that a lot of cases can be attributed to radiation. Of course, cars, pollution, less than natural foods, poor diet, etc. have all contributed to the increase of cases. Just a comment