The history of the discovery of the cigarette-lung cancer link: evidentiary traditions, corporate denial, global toll

Authored by pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov and submitted by J0shua1985
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Lung cancer was once a very rare disease, so rare that doctors took special notice when confronted with a case, thinking it a once-in-a-lifetime oddity. Mechanisation and mass marketing towards the end of the 19th century popularised the cigarette habit, however, causing a global lung cancer epidemic. Cigarettes were recognised as the cause of the epidemic in the 1940s and 1950s, with the confluence of studies from epidemiology, animal experiments, cellular pathology and chemical analytics. Cigarette manufacturers disputed this evidence, as part of an orchestrated conspiracy to salvage cigarette sales. Propagandising the public proved successful, judging from secret tobacco industry measurements of the impact of denialist propaganda. As late as 1960 only one-third of all US doctors believed that the case against cigarettes had been established. The cigarette is the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilisation. Cigarettes cause about 1 lung cancer death per 3 or 4 million smoked, which explains why the scale of the epidemic is so large today. Cigarettes cause about 1.5 million deaths from lung cancer per year, a number that will rise to nearly 2 million per year by the 2020s or 2030s, even if consumption rates decline in the interim. Part of the ease of cigarette manufacturing stems from the ubiquity of high-speed cigarette making machines, which crank out 20,000 cigarettes per min. Cigarette makers make about a penny in profit for every cigarette sold, which means that the value of a life to a cigarette maker is about US$10,000.

inabearsuit on January 16th, 2021 at 20:06 UTC »

Interestingly enough, lung cancer is one of the leading cause of cancer-related mortality in non-smokers. 1 in 10 lung cancer patients (in the US) have never smoked.

I didn't look for worldwide info, but I'm guessing the rate is higher in countries with much higher pollution rates.

Gemmabeta on January 16th, 2021 at 20:05 UTC »

Incidentally, one of the first people to notice what would become the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s were dermatologists, who suddenly noticed that a whole bunch of otherwise healthy New York City and San Francisco males with zero health history were suddenly becoming deathly ill with Kaposi's Sarcoma--a very obscure cancer that was basically considered to be nigh harmless (Randy Shilts in And the Band Played On described KS as a "cancer that only affected a handful of 80-years-old Northern Italian men, all of whom died 20 years later from something else").

It would later turn out that Kaposi's was a cancer that was exclusively caused by a rare form of herpes, the virus was generally too weak to infect anyone with an intact immune system.

spacey007 on January 16th, 2021 at 19:21 UTC »

Also before cars and coal factories

Edit: also before we ya know started blowing up massive radioactive bombs into the atmosphere for a few years