Word: lungfuls
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After years of bombarding each other with flat denials and unflattering recriminations, the two sides in the smoking-and-lung-cancer controversy came close to sense-making agreement last week. Previously, evidence has usually been offered at one-sided meetings-either by those who indict heavy cigarette smoking as the principal cause or by those who put the blame for lung cancer's explosive increase on general atmospheric pollution. Last week authorities from both schools met in San Francisco under auspices of the University of California* the Tobacco Industry Research Committee put up $28,000 toward expenses...
...Zealand general practitioner, Dr. David F. Eastcott, might have been speaking for nearly everyone present when he declared: "The incidence of lung cancer is complexly determined and cannot be related solely or principally to a single factor. Tobacco smoking plays a part. Atmospheric pollution plays a part." Trouble is, he complained, that the evidence incriminating heavy cigarette smoking is "compact" (and hence easily grasped), while that indicting air pollution is diverse and various...
...death rate from lung cancer among both men and women, Dr. Eastcott found, was 30% higher among the British-born, and 75% higher among those who emigrated to New Zealand after age 30. No such discrepancy appeared with cancer in other parts of the body. Moreover, though New Zealanders (native and immigrant alike) smoke even more heavily than stay-at-home Britons, the dominion's lung-cancer death rate is still lower than the old country's. Concluded Dr. Eastcott: "Something happens to the Britisher in his native environment that increases his susceptibility to lung cancer . . . I regard...
...minimized the importance of smoking, emphasized public air pollution. This time, though he piled up more scientific data to convict public air pollution, Dr. Kotin also plumped for multiple causation. He doubted, he said, that heavy cigarette smoking or "personal air pollution" plays a "primary role" in causing lung cancer, but he granted that it may be guilty as a fellow criminal. The researchers still differed in their theories of sequence: Dr. Eastcott thought British air pollution sets the stage for smoking to damage the lungs and perhaps lead to cancer, while Dr. Kotin thought smoking sets the stage...
Conference participants also moved to clear up two other seeming contradictions which have bedeviled the years-long research. Why is it that, with Americans smoking about as many cigarettes as Britons, and at least some U.S. cities having air pollution as bad as many of Britain's, the lung-cancer death rate is markedly higher in Britain than in the U.S.? One factor is obvious but too often overlooked, said London's Dr. Patrick Lawther: U.S. pollution is mainly industrial, whereas Britain's comes largely from the burning of soft (bituminous) coal in open grates...