"Second-hand smoke to kill 2 million Chinese"
The more I hear about what is going on in China, the more I wonder if the goons running that country have any clue about the health catastrophe lurking at the palace doors.
Dr. Peymane Adab and K.K. Cheng of Britain's University of Birmingham, with colleagues in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, used data from a study of 20,430 men and women over the age of 50. Most had never smoked.
"More than half of never smokers reported exposure to passive smoking in their workplace and at home, with 28 percent reporting high levels of total adult exposure," Adab and Cheng wrote in their report, published in the Lancet medical journal.
What they extrapolate from these facts is that since 12% of Chinese die from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease despite never smoking, nearly two million individuals alive today will die from COPD due to chronic, repeated exposure to the cigarette smoke from nearby puffers, i.e., passive smoking.
A disturbing statistic, for sure, but as long as we're tossing around big numbers how about this Ripley's Believe It or Not tidbit: 53,314,519 Chinese smoke.
It almost makes me want to pack my carpetbag and head on down the Silk Road. It seems fair to state that there will be plenty of business for sinophilic oncologists, for as long as they can gaze into the future, hazy though it may be.
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How did they control for exposure to other forms of atmospheric pollution? Presumably cigarette smoke isn't the only pollutant to cause COPD? They do have rather a lot of heavy industry and little or no pollution controls, after all...
It was hard for me to grasp what 54 million smokers would be like until I thought about it like this: 54 million = 1 out of every 2 men over 18 years old in this country smoking. That is a lot a 2nd hand. And where would all of those cig butts go to. I'll tell you where. Right onto my lawn.