Month: September 2022

WOMEN WHO SMOKE DURING PREGNANCY are shown in many surveys to be unaware of the very serious consequences to the fetus. http://www.healthguidance.org/entry/4197/1/The-Dangers-of-Smoking-Cigarettes-While-Pregnant.html View in LinkedIn

SMOKING IS LEADING PREVENTABLE CAUSE OF DISEASE. "Worldwide, tobacco use causes more than 5 million deaths per year, and current trends show that tobacco use will cause more than 8 million deaths annually by 2030." https://lnkd.in/dHzHrjf View in LinkedIn

"CIGARETTE SMOKING is responsible for about one in five deaths annually (i.e., more than 440,000 deaths per year, and an estimated 49,000 of these smoking-related deaths are the result of secondhand smoke exposure). On average, smokers die 10 years earlier than nonsmokers." https://lnkd.in/dHzHrjf View in LinkedIn

EU ANTI-SMOKING LEGISLATION "is to be introduced across the European Union in an attempt to cut the number of smokers by 2.4 million. The rules, voted in by the European Parliament, mean picture health warnings will have to dominate the front and back of all packaging." https://lnkd.in/d7pZpcp View in LinkedIn

TOBACCO TAX REMAINS A BIG CARROT. "What the CBO study shows is the litigation that showered such huge benefits on a few was based on the false premise that cigarettes cost taxpayers money. Unfortunately, tobacco is, and has always been, a very reliable moneymaker for the state." https://lnkd.in/dsKPmv3 View in LinkedIn

UK SEEKS REVENUE NEUTRALITY. "The tax on cigarettes should be increased as the burden on the taxpayer is too high, even taking into account revenues from duty ... Policy Exchange called for a five per cent rise in next week's budget - a rise of 23p for a pack of 20 - and further rises over the next five years to ensure smoking became 'revenue neutral'." https://lnkd.in/d2B7dpT View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT IN NATURE: a pause in our ongoing review of tobacco issues. In this Fragment, we look at an extraordinary phenomenon called quorum sensing, starting with bacteria. This phenomenon has broken old paradigms about how bacteria communicate among themselves, and how other species can tap into this language. View in LinkedIn

“QUORUM SENSING is a system of stimulus and response correlated to population density. Many species of bacteria use quorum sensing to coordinate gene expression according to the density of their local population. In similar fashion, some social insects use quorum sensing to determine where to nest.” http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing View in LinkedIn

NEW PARADIGM. “For many years bacteria were considered primarily as autonomous unicellular organisms with little capacity for collective behaviour. However, we now appreciate that bacterial cells are in fact, highly communicative. The generic term ‘quorum sensing’ has been adopted to describe the bacterial cell-to-cell communication mechanisms which co-ordinate gene expression usually, but not always, when the population has reached a high cell density." "”https://lnkd.in/dkHXcWW http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/362/1483/1119 View in LinkedIn

DIFFERENT SCALES. "Long time scales are needed for signals to diffuse over long distances. A small molecule will take 10 years to diffuse a distance of 1 m. It is not yet clear whether microbes in nature exchange signals over long distances.” The challenge of molecular signals. https://lnkd.in/dGPmiAc View in LinkedIn