Radioactive Smoke

I’ve somewhat followed the case of the former KGB agent, Alexander Litvinenko, who died last week after being poisoned by radioactive polonium-210. Investigators in the UK have found traces of radioactivity in several airplanes and restaurants where Mr. Litvinenko was present, which has caused a good deal of concern in the public. As I’ve followed that event, however, I wasn’t aware that it had important implications for my family and friends in the U.S.

Polonium-210 is also found in cigarettes.

Scientists believe that certain uranium products naturally present in soils are absorbed by tobacco plants and decay into radioactive polonium. Apparently, the tobacco industry has known since the 60s that their products contain significant levels of polonium. They also know that their cigarette filters don’t trap this isotope effectively.

While a fraction of a trillionth of a curie (the unit of radiation) of polonium-210 in each cigarette may not sound like much, polonium is a powerful radionuclide that emits alpha particles at a much higher rate than the plutonium in the bombs dropped on Japan. Polonium-210 is thousands of times more radioactive than the nuclear material used in early atomic bombs, and alpha particles are deadly culprits in lung cancer.

Smokers tend to smoke a lot of cigarettes. With .04 pico-curies of polonium-210 in each cigarette, a pack-and-a-half-a-day smoker inhales a lifetime dose equal to about 300 chest x-rays. That’s worth thinking about before lighting up the next pack-and-a-half tomorrow.

No one knows how many people have died or will die from polonium in tobacco. There are hundreds of toxic chemicals in cigarette smoke and it’s hard to sort out which one causes what. But experts don’t dispute the size of the risk. The World Health Organization estimates that by 2020 10 million people will die annually from cigarettes. Cigarettes killed about 100 million people in the 20th century. In this century, the death toll could be close to a billion.

Arsenic, cyanide, tar and nicotine are bad enough – but radiation? As people learn more about tobacco, it should become more difficult for the industry to continue asserting that the dangers of cigarettes are “common knowledge”. Even knowledgeable smokers would probably be surprised to learn that cigarette smoke is radioactive, and that the scare related to a poisoned KGB agent may be insignificant when compared to what rolls out the end of 5.7 trillion cigarettes every year.

Back to my family and friends – I’ve had loved ones who smoke, and some may do so now. If they’re doing so now, or if they think about doing so in the future, I urge them to think again about what they’re sucking into their lungs, and what they’re putting into the air around them for others to suck into their lungs – arsenic, cyanide and radioactive polonium-210, not to mention the old favorites, tar and nicotine.

For those loved ones who are parents, I urge them to do everything possible to prevent their children from smoking – and there is no preventative step more powerful than personal example. Smoking parents, including the ones who think they’re being “responsible” by never smoking in their home or who think that they smoke without their children knowing about it, need to understand that no one smokes in secret. Smokers wear their habit on their skin, in their hair, on their clothes, in their cars, and on their breath long after the last draw – the evidence is in and on everything that comes in contact with the smoke. Kids know. They just don’t know that it’s radioactive.

Please don’t start. Please don’t start again. Please stop. Please don’t become a statistic in the new century.