Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko's poisoning last week by polonium 210 still has British security services scrambling for answers as to who slipped this lethal isotope to him and how. I wonder if he was a chain smoker?
According to Stanford University professor Robert Proctor writing in The New York Times:
"The industry has been aware at least since the 1960s that cigarettes contain significant levels of polonium. Exactly how it gets into tobacco is not entirely understood, but uranium “daughter products” naturally present in soils seem to be selectively absorbed by the tobacco plant, where they decay into radioactive polonium. High-phosphate fertilizers may worsen the problem, since uranium tends to associate with phosphates.
"A fraction of a trillionth of a curie (a unit of radiation named for polonium’s discoverers, Marie and Pierre Curie) may not sound like much, but remember that we’re talking about a powerful radionuclide disgorging alpha particles — the most dangerous kind when it comes to lung cancer — at a much higher rate even than the plutonium used in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Polonium 210 has a half life of about 138 days, making it thousands of times more radioactive than the nuclear fuels used in early atomic bombs.
"We should also recall that people smoke a lot of cigarettes — about 5.7 trillion worldwide every year, enough to make a continuous chain from the earth to the sun and back, with enough left over for a few side-trips to Mars. If .04 picocuries of polonium are inhaled with every cigarette, about a quarter of a curie of one of the world’s most radioactive poisons is inhaled along with the tar, nicotine and cyanide of all the world’s cigarettes smoked each year. Pack-and-a-half smokers are dosed to the tune of about 300 chest X-rays.
"The tobacco industry of course doesn’t like to have attention drawn to the more exotic poisons in tobacco smoke. Arsenic, cyanide and nicotine, bad enough. But radiation? As more people learn more about the secrets hidden in the golden leaf, it may become harder for the industry to align itself with candy and coffee — and harder to maintain, as we often hear in litigation, that the dangers of tobacco have long been “common knowledge.” I suspect that even some of our more enlightened smokers will be surprised to learn that cigarette smoke is radioactive, and that these odd fears spilling from a poisoned K.G.B. man may be molehills compared with our really big cancer mountains.
2 comments:
I've heard before that smoking may attract radioactive particles, but not that the plant itself draws them in from the soil. And just yesterday I was listening to a neighbour in denial mode because his wife smokes "and there's no way second hand smoke kills you". He only has MS, I'm sure that's completely unrelated.
Considering it has been know within public health for more then 44 years that tobacco is contaminated by low levels of PO-210 resulting from the use of high phosphate fertilizers. I have to wonder why the people responsible for watching over the public's health has failed to recommend that these high phosphate fertilizers not be used on tobacco for human consumption. Either PO-210 is not a serious threat, and instead is fodder for propaganda to scare the masses, or public health is grossly negligent, as in 44 years they have done nothing to prevent the use of this type of fertilizers on something used for human consumption. See: Polonium-210: A Volatile Radioelement in Cigarettes by Edward P. Radford Jr. and Vilma R. Hunt, Department of Physiology, Kresge Center for Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts Science 17 January 1964: Vol. 143. no. 3603, pp. 247 - 249 DOI: 10.1126/science.143.3603.247
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