Austria: Cigarette chewing dog killed on way to tobacconists

A 10-a-day cigarette chewing 24-year-old Dachshund has been knocked down and killed – on his way to the tobacconist's shop.

General Edi has been munching his way through half a packet of cigarettes every day since he was a puppy, said owner Wolfgang Treirler.

But Edi has died after he was hit by a car during a walk to his favourite cigarette shop.

"Poor Edi dashed out in the road in excitement right in front of a car.

There was nothing anyone could do," said one neighbour in Graz, central Austria.

Mr Treirler said:"His old owner abandoned him and so we took him in 17 years ago, and noticed straight away that he was in the habit of eating cigarettes.

"He eats the tobacco and the paper, and then chews a while on the filter before spitting it out.

"On average he eats about 10 cigarettes a day, but all of his teeth are fine."

A local vet, Harald Mayr, said: "Nicotine normally leads to poisoning in dogs, but in this case the animal has obviously become addicted to it which has increased its level of tolerance."

Source: The Telegraph, 18 December 2008
Link: http://tinyurl.com/3gpfbp

Scotland: Rise in young adult smokers

The number of young adult smokers in Scotland has risen in the last three years, new data shows.

A report by NHS Health Scotland and the Scottish Public Health Observatory placed smoking rates among 16 to 24 year olds at 30% in 2007, compared with 25% in 2004.

The analysis, based on figures from the Scottish Household Survey, found the smoking rates of those aged 16-24 had decreased from 31% to 25% between 1999 and 2004, but rose to nearly one third in 2007.

Source: The Press Association, 19 December 2008
Link: http://tinyurl.com/4j4tjk

New York: Drop in secondhand smoke deaths predicted

The number of deaths and heart attacks due to secondhand smoke exposure may fall by as much as 30 percent if current downward trends in passive smoking exposure continue, according to a new report.

"Exposure to passive smoking has been reduced by 25 percent to 40 percent, and its burden has been reduced by 25 percent and 30 percent over the last 8-10 years, but the burden remains substantial," Dr. James M. Lightwood and colleagues write in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Lightwood of the University of California San Francisco and his team used the Coronary Heart Disease Policy Model to gauge the health and cost burden of passive smoking on US residents over 35. The model is a computer simulation of the impact of heart disease caused by smoking, blood pressure, cholesterol levels and other factors.

The researchers estimated the prevalence of passive smoking exposure by looking at measurements of cotinine, a nicotine byproduct, in the blood of people participating in the National Health and Nutrition Evaluation Survey. At least a quarter of people 35 to 84 met the strictest criteria for second-hand smoke exposure, while up to 40 percent of men and 30 percent of women are exposed to some level of secondhand smoke.

Based on the assumption that passive smoke exposure boosts heart disease risk by 26 percent to 65 percent, for 1999-2004 Lightwood and his colleagues peg the number of heart disease deaths a year due to passive smoking at 21,800 to 75,100, and estimate that secondhand smoke causes 38,100 to 128,900 heart attacks.

If the downward trend in passive smoking exposure observed between 1988 and 2004 continued through to 2008, according to the researchers, deaths and heart attacks due to second-hand smoke would fall by 25 percent to 30 percent.

Continued reduction in second-hand smoke exposure will likely be driven by efforts to ban smoking in public and in the workplace and to promote smokefree homes, they conclude.

Source: Reuters News, 18 December 2008
Link: http://tinyurl.com/49suwo

If anyone still thinks it is easy to give up smoking, they need only look at the next US president

Opinion piece by Alexander Chancellor

If evidence were still required of the addictive nature of tobacco, one need only look at the case of the president-elect of the United States. For Barack Obama, who was pictured in yesterday's papers as a college student sucking jauntily on a cigarette, has still not managed to kick the habit nearly 20 years later, despite the fact that some opinion polls found his smoking a greater obstacle to his election than the colour of his skin. 

Obama appears to have tried really hard to stop, and says he has cut his smoking down to the occasional fag bummed from a member of his staff; but he still hasn't given up completely, despite being a fitness fanatic who spends more than an hour a day in the gym. In this he is not alone. It is not uncommon for people to strive to be healthy (working out, gulping vitamin pills, eating only organic vegetables) while persisting with the habit that does them the most harm of all. They seem to hope that their other efforts will somehow neutralise its ill effects.

Obama has committed himself to giving up properly when he goes to the White House, where smoking has been banned since the days of Nancy Reagan. But everyone knows how easily such promises are broken, and I wonder what penalty will be inflicted on the president if he is caught furtively breaking the rule?

In Britain, health warnings and bans in public places have undoubtedly had an effect, and the Department of Health claims that 350,000 people gave up smoking last year as a result of such initiatives. But there are many who obdurately continue to smoke and, according to the DoH, smoking still kills some 87,000 people a year in England alone. Rather like the Bank of England with its measures to stimulate the economy, the government seems to be running out of weapons in its war on the weed.

Its latest step has been to put graphic images on cigarette packets to show what smoking can do to you. Not all of these are alarming. One warns that "smoking can damage the sperm" with rather a charming illustration of what look like tadpoles. But even the shockers - such as the pictures of a red, bulging tumour on a man's neck and of brown and yellow diseased lungs - may not put everyone off.

For there is a view, hotly debated this week on the letters page of the New York Times, that such warning labels only increase people's craving to smoke. One correspondent put this down to the fact that humans are the only animals who know that they are bound one day to die and that "there is something fundamental to the human spirit that is infuriated by this".

"If the world will kill us no matter what we do, why not assume God-like powers and claim a role in the process?" he wrote. "I have long thought that one of the explanations for many types of self-destructive behaviour is this basic need to play a direct part in our tragic fate. There is a sad nobility in this."

I would like to associate my own cigarette habit with such "sad nobility", but I really don't think I can. I have no urge to contribute to my own death: my smoking is just a wretched addiction. You may nevertheless recall that a cigarette called "Death" - in a packet illustrated with a skull and crossbones - enjoyed brief success in the 90s. Promoting itself as "the honest smoke", it gained such a foothold in the market that the tobacco industry ganged up to suppress it. This suggests that the critics of the current shock images on cigarette packets may have a point.

It was once suggested during the presidential campaign that Obama should be more open about his smoking so as to win the support of working-class voters who saw him as snooty and elitist. But that would have lost him only the votes of a much larger part of the population that despises the habit - a part to which Obama himself appears to belong. The most striking thing about it all is that a man as calm, controlled and disciplined as the next president should have so far failed in his efforts to set himself free. At least I can take comfort from the fact that I am in the most distinguished company. But I also intend to join him in his New Year resolution to stop smoking, mainly in my case because it's just too expensive.

The question is how to do it. Past experience tells me that bans and health warnings have little effect. Even nicotine patches or chewing gum are of only partial assistance. The only sure way is just to make the decision and stick to it. Nothing else - not even the millions spent by governments on threats and exhortations - is of much help.

Source: The Guardian, 19 December 2008
Link: http://tinyurl.com/4b97yv

Quit-smoking program cuts post-op complications

For smokers scheduled to undergo an operation, a smoking cessation program that starts shortly before surgery lowers the rate of post-op complications, a Scandinavian study shows.

The time around a surgical procedure "is a highly effective period for introducing a smoking cessation intervention," Dr. David Lindstrom from the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, said.

Dr. Lindstrom and colleagues investigated the effects of a quit-smoking program versus no intervention, starting 4 weeks before general and orthopedic surgery. Of the 117 patients who were enrolled, 102 were ultimately evaluated.

Nineteen patients (40 percent) in the intervention group stopped smoking for the entire study period, compared with only one patient (2 percent) in the no-intervention group, the team reports in the Annals of Surgery.

The overall postoperative complication rate was significantly lower in the smoking-cessation group (21 percent) than in the control group (41 percent).

Complications occurred in 15 percent of patients who stopped smoking at least 3 weeks before surgery, in 22 percent of those who stopped 1 to 2 weeks beforehand, and in 37 percent of those who continued smoking.

"Our collaborators in the orthopedics department are currently investigating if smoking cessation intervention started at the time of acute fracture surgery is effective in reducing postoperative complications," Lindstrom commented.

Source: Reuters News, 18 December 2008
Link: http://tinyurl.com/4xgjvp