What Is In A Cigarette?

There are approximately 600 ingredients in cigarettes. Cigarette manufacturers, to enhance the taste and maintain the freshness of the cigarette, amongst other things, add many of these ingredients to the tobacco. When burned, they create more than 6500 chemicals. At least 250 are poisons and are known to be toxic to humans, and 69 of them are known to cause cancer.

Many of these chemicals are also found in consumer products, but these products have warning labels. While consumers are warned about the danger of the poisons in these products, there are no such warning labels on cigarette packs.

Here are a few of the chemicals in tobacco smoke, and other places they are found:

• Acetone – found in nail polish remover
• Acetic Acid – an ingredient in hair dye
• Ammonia – a common household cleaner
• Arsenic – used in rat poison and to preserve wood
• Benzene – found in rubber cement
• Butane – used in lighter fluid
• Cadmium – active component in battery acid
• Carbon Monoxide – released in car exhaust fumes
• Chromium VI – is used to make alloy metals, paint and dyes
• Cyanide – a deadly poison
• DDT – an insecticide
• Formaldehyde – embalming fluid for dead bodies
• Hexamine – found in barbecue lighter fluid
• Lead – used in batteries
• Naphthalene – an ingredient in moth balls
• Nicotine – a deadly poison used in insecticides
• Methanol – a main component in rocket fuel
• Polonium-210 – a radioactive chemical element
• Sulfuric Acid – used in car batteries
• Tar – material for paving roads
• Toluene – used to manufacture paint

According to chemists at R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, cigarette smoke is 10 000 times more concentrated than the vehicle pollution at rush hour on a freeway. The lungs of smokers, smoking 20 to 60 low to high tar cigarettes per day, collect an annual deposit of 113 to 680 grams of the gooey black material. And some studies show that people who smoke a pack-and-a-half of cigarettes a day are receiving the same radiation they’d get from 300-plus X-rays per year! And aside from this there is not one chemical in cigarette smoke that provides any known benefit to a human being. Nicotine itself is a deadly poison and is more toxic than arsenic.

The Health Risks Of Smoking

A Global Health Epidemic

Smoking is one of the biggest public health threats the world has ever faced. According to The World Health Organisation (WHO) smoking kills nearly 7 million people each year. More than six million of those deaths are the result of direct smoking, while more than 600 000 are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke.

Approximately one person dies every six seconds due to smoking, accounting for 1 in 10 adult deaths. Up to one half of smokers will eventually die of a smoking-related disease, half in middle age and half in their senior years.

Smoking caused 100 million deaths in the 20th century. If current trends continue, it may cause 1 billion deaths in the 21st century.

Smoking Health Risks For Smokers

Smoking increases your risk of developing more than 50 serious health conditions. Some may be fatal and others can cause irreversible long-term damage to your health. Smoking harms nearly every organ of the body and accounts for one-third of all cancers. Foremost among the cancers caused by smoking is lung cancer, the number one cancer killer of both men and women, and as many as 9 out of 10 people diagnosed with lung cancer can directly blame their smoking habit.

Other health hazards include:

• Cancers of the mouth, kidney, oesophagus, pharynx, larynx, stomach, pancreas, cervix, ureter and bladder, and acute myeloid leukaemia.
• Heart diseases including stroke, vascular disease, heart attack, and aneurysm.
• Lung diseases such as chronic bronchitis, emphysema and COPD.
• Eyesight problems and cataracts

Smokers are also more likely to suffer from periodontal disease, diabetes or insulin resistance, infertility and changes in their physical appearance, including premature ageing and wrinkled, pale, unhealthy skin.

Smoking is also a factor in the slowed healing of wounds and can worsen or prolong symptoms of asthma and respiratory track infections, such as the common cold and pneumonia. On average, non-smokers live about 10 to 14 years longer than smokers.

Smoking Health Risks For Non-smokers

Passive or secondary smoke increases risk for many diseases including lung cancer and cardiovascular disease in non-smokers, as well as increasing the severity of asthma in children and incidence of sudden infant death syndrome.

Pregnant smokers have an increased risk of stillborn, miscarriage, premature or low-birth weight infants. Children of women who smoked while pregnant have an increased risk for developing conduct disorders.

The U.S. Surgeon General estimates that living with a smoker increases a non-smoker’s chances of developing lung cancer by 20 to 30 percent.