RE: Lung Cancer Is Not Just For Smokers
@williambanks Downwinders, wow. I would love to pick your brain about that sometime.
Let me start by saying that I am not an epidemiologist, I am just familiar with the studies concerning environmental contamaninants because of my work in toxic torts. I agree--there are certianly many factors, including environmental pollution and genetics, that play a roll in the progression of diseases like cancer.
We know that cigarette smoke is comprised of a number of carcinogens that, when inhaled, can bind to DNA and create DNA adducts, which are pieces of DNA bonded to a carcinogen (think formaldehyde, arsenic, ammonia, etc). Our body has repair processes that are capable of removing adducts and restoring DNA, but failure to remove them can lead to permanent mutations . . . and so on and so forth. So, while your family's repair processes may be able to handle smoking, others' might not. Nothing is guaranteed, though, so it's a roll of the dice.
@deviedev
Of course, I completely agree. I just wanted to show the other side of that which is that if smoking ain't gonna kill ya. Nothin will :)
I'd be glad to talk to you about downwinders anytime you want. You have to keep in mind I'm a child of the 1970s so it was my parents, my grandparents, my aunts, uncles and cousins etc that all died off in a largish batch from the late 1980s until the mid 1990s. We eventually adopted the motto that "The surest sign there would be a funeral next week was that there was a funeral the previous week". This process went on and on and on, until we literally just ran out of people to bury.
Last ones left standing all seemed to be smokers.
That was also the time frame I was coming of age. Smoking weed, experimenting with drugs and reading everything from Neil Gaiman to Stephen Hawking to figure out, what all this was, that was going on around me. So a lot of my world view is framed in by all of that.
It's not a roll of the dice though, it's genetic russian roulette. :D