Tobacco.org

Lung Cancer Alliance Offers Condolences to Paterno Family 

Today, Lung Cancer Alliance (LAC) offers condolences to the family of legendary Penn State University coach Joseph Paterno who died of lung cancer this morning.

His death came just a few weeks after being diagnosed with a late stage, untreatable form of the disease.

Lung Cancer Alliance President Laurie Fenton-Ambrose said: "So many patients have faced this, so many families have been hurt by this disease which is the leading cause of cancer death in the United States and the world." . . .

"And just as sadly this is the only cancer that continues to be blamed on the patient," she said, pointing out that four out of five new cases are people who never smoked or who had already quit smoking, often decades ago.

"It is time - it is long overdue - that we take a more compassionate and comprehensive approach to this disease, give people at high risk the benefit of CT screening and give priority attention to improving the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of all types of lung cancer," she said.

Jump to full article »

Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans, heiress to Duke tobacco fortune and philanthropist, dies at 91 

Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans, heiress to a vast Gilded Age fortune built on tobacco and member of the family that endowed Duke University, has died. She was 91.

Her daughter, Rebecca Trent Kirkland, said the Durham, N.C., resident died Wednesday at Duke Hospital.

She was the great-granddaughter of Washington Duke, a Confederate soldier who returned home after the Civil War and planted a crop of tobacco. With his sons, Duke helped build the worldwide popularity of cigarettes. He also endowed a small Methodist college that would become Duke University."

"She was our principal link to Duke's founding generation and continued her family's tradition of benevolence throughout her life," Duke University President Richard H. Brodhead said. "She supported every good thing at this university, and she was a powerful force for good in Durham and the Carolinas."

Jump to full article »

Durham Tobacco Heiress Dies at 91 

Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans, heiress to a Gilded Age fortune created by tobacco and member of the family that endowed Duke University, died Wednesday at Duke Hospital according to her daughter. She was 91.

Semans was the great-granddaughter of Washington Duke, a confederate soldier who returned home after the Civil War and planted tobacco.

Jump to full article »

Lung Cancer: Joe Paterno's Death Is One of Thousands 

Football legend Joe Paterno's death from lung cancer has put a spotlight on the illness, which is the number-one cancer death in the United States, with the death rate higher than breast, colon and prostate cancer combined.

Figures for 2006, the latest year available, show that lung cancer from cigarette smoking kills 135,000 people every year.

It's not known if Paterno, 85, smoked cigarettes. But cigarette smoking is unquestionably the biggest cause of lung cancer. Other causes include environmental factors like second-hand smoke, radon, a family history of lung cancer, air pollution and high-level exposure to carcinogens including coal products and diesel exhaust. Some people, like Christopher Reeve's widow Dana Reeve, get lung cancer for seemingly no reason at all.

According to the National Institutes Of health, the illness is divided into two categories - non small-cell lung cancer and small-cell lung cancer. Small-cell lung cancer spreads more quickly, and non small-cell lung cancer, which is more common, spreads fairly slowly.

Jump to full article »

Lung Cancer Alliance Offers Condolences to Paterno Family 

Today, Lung Cancer Alliance (LAC) offers condolences to the family of legendary Penn State University coach Joseph Paterno who died of lung cancer this morning.

His death came just a few weeks after being diagnosed with a late stage, untreatable form of the disease.

Lung Cancer Alliance President Laurie Fenton-Ambrose said: "So many patients have faced this, so many families have been hurt by this disease which is the leading cause of cancer death in the United States and the world."

The overall 5-year survival rate for those diagnosed with lung cancer is still only 15%, and less than 4% for those with late stage lung cancer.

"And just as sadly this is the only cancer that continues to be blamed on the patient," she said, pointing out that four out of five new cases are people who never smoked or who had already quit smoking, often decades ago.

Jump to full article »

A look back on the life of Hitchens  

The last time I saw him, about a week before his diagnosis of esophageal cancer, was at a book party (at the same home) where a small group of us were smoking and talking by candlelight under a tree. It was one of those magical times when you want to freeze time and preserve the moment. (Though I quit smoking 28 years ago, I still find smokers to be the most interesting people at a party and often join in solidarity.) I have no idea what we were discussing, but I do remember that Hitchens declined to share a pink, gold-filtered Nat Sherman he wanted to try, saying he’d inhale the whole thing in a single drag. He did.

Jump to full article »

Sue Carroll: Journalist acclaimed for her straight-talking columns 

For the last 50 years or so the chippy female columnist, with strongly stated commonsense attitudes towards nearly everything, has been an indispensable presence in British tabloid newspapers. Jean Rook and Lynda Lee-Potter were among the acknowledged mistresses of the craft – and the Daily Mirror's Sue Carroll, who died from pancreatic cancer on Christmas Day, aged 58, has every right to be ranked alongside them. . . .

For the last 50 years or so the chippy female columnist, with strongly stated commonsense attitudes towards nearly everything, has been an indispensable presence in British tabloid newspapers. Jean Rook and Lynda Lee-Potter were among the acknowledged mistresses of the craft – and the Daily Mirror's Sue Carroll, who died from pancreatic cancer on Christmas Day, aged 58, has every right to be ranked alongside them. . . .

She became a star columnist in 1998, comparatively late in her career, after holding a series of executive positions on newspapers and magazines within Rupert Murdoch's News International group. When the rival Mirror lured her away she set out her stall in her debut article with a forthright declaration of principle – in effect a manifesto for all such columns: "I'm about real life... I don't like being told what to do by bullies. I will be looking at life in a rough, no-nonsense way and, most importantly, I intend to talk from the heart." . . .

She returned to the News of the World to edit Sunday, its weekly magazine, and in a book published to mark the paper's 150th anniversary in 1993 she was described as "a voluptuous red-headed Geordie". (On her staff was a younger woman with similar hair colouring, Rebekah Wade, who was to rise rapidly through the ranks to become News International's chief executive, the post from which she resigned this year at the height of the phone hacking scandal.)

In the summer of 2010 Carroll was diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas, the disease from which her maternal grandfather had died. During afive-hour operation surgeons discovered that two malignant tumours could not be removed because they weretoo close to an artery. A few weeks later, while undergoing chemotherapy,she suffered a stroke that left her partly paralysed. Yet the following March she was able to write a long article in the Mirror describing her illness and its treatment.

Jump to full article »

CLARK: Sue Carroll's "rants" must not be in vain 

The death of Mirror journalist Sue Carroll, aged 58, is very sad news.

It's a huge loss not only for her partner, family and friends, but also for Forest and anyone who values old-fashioned virtues such as tolerance, courtesy and common sense.

Sue outed herself as a member of Forest in 2006. I don't know when she first registered her support but our paths had crossed the previous year with the publication of a book she had co-written with Sue Brealey. It was called The Joy of Smoking and Sue (Brealey) asked if we could help promote it. Afterwards Sue (Carroll) sent "a very quick line to say thank-you for all the help you've given us, it's very much appreciated".

Later that year she accepted our invitation to take part in what became a famous Forest event at the Labour party conference in Brighton (David Hockney leads opposition against ban on smoking in all public places). Afterwards she joined Hockney, Joe Jackson and several other guests for a private dinner that still makes me laugh and smile when I think about it. . . .

it was a genuinely shocking moment when I read, earlier this year, that she had pancreatic cancer and the outlook was bleak. . . .

earlier this year, My cancer fight - Mirror columnist opens her heart over pancreatic tumour.

The latter includes this comment:

No one has blamed my lifestyle, so I don’t regret a single cigarette or cocktail. I’d love my old life back but I was as determined then, as I am now, not to whinge about life being unfair.

Jump to full article »

Friend of Forest acclaimed for her straight-talking columns 

Colleagues of Sue Carroll have been paying tribute to the Daily Mirror columnist who died of pancreatic cancer on Christmas Day aged 58.

Editor Richard Wallace described her as "the heart and soul of the Daily Mirror".

"Sue had faced her long and painful illness with enviable fortitude," he said. "Until the final few days she was still doing what she loved the most: reading the papers and giving her inimitable thoughts on the world around us - with, of course, the odd no-nonsense rant thrown in. . . .

'Her favourite targets,' the paper added, 'included political correctness, yobbish behaviour and the "health police". A militant advocate for the right to smoke in public, she appeared on platforms at meetings organised by Forest, the tobacco industry's lobby group [sic], in their failed attempt to head off the Labour government's ban on smoking in pubs and restaurants.'

Paying tribute to Carroll on his blog Taking Liberties, Forest director Simon Clark wrote:

"Of all national newspaper columnists, it was Sue who was most likely to rail against the smoking ban and other laws designed to bully and denormalise ordinary men and women who choose to smoke. . . .

Writing about her inoperable illness in the Mirror in March 2011, Carroll said:

"No one has blamed my lifestyle, so I don't regret a single cigarette or cocktail," she wrote. "I'd love my old life back but I was as determined then, as I am now, not to whinge about life being unfair."

"The absence of self-pity," said Clark, "is one of many reasons to mourn Sue Carroll's death. Others include her outspoken support for personal choice and her empathy for ordinary people, especially those who choose to smoke and drink.

Jump to full article »

Death certificates and smokers  

New this year to Mississippi's coroners and physicians.

As of January first, they are required to check a box on death certificates if smoking contributed to the person's death.

Monroe County Coroner Alan Gurley says the Mississippi State Department of Health now requires this information.

"As coroners and death investigators, we go out and investigate a death. We will have to find out if the person smoked or not and whether the smoking actually was a contributing cause to their death. So, it's a little something different-a little more information we'll have to ask for when we go out on a call," Gurley said.

Jump to full article »

Chris Draft, NFL Retiree, Buries Wife One Month After Wedding, Sheds Light On Lung Cancer Among Non-Smokers 

Lakeasha Monique Rutledge Draft "courageously faced lung cancer, showing us all with every breath that we all need to hold onto life and love with both hands for as long as we can" her husband and former NFL star Chris Draft wrote on his foundation's website last week, honoring his wife who died from lung cancer on December 27, just one month after the couple wed.

The 38-year-old, who was diagnosed with the terminal disease last year, never smoked according to the Daily Mail, joining some 16,000 to 24,000 Americans who die of lung cancer every year even though they have never smoked.

While second-hand smoke is listed as one of the main causes of lung cancer among non-smokers, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that the leading cause of lung cancer in the non-smoking group is exposure to radon gas, accounting for about 20,000 deaths each year. . . .

While it's long been known that both indoor and outdoor air pollution contribute to lung cancer, a recent study published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine measured the fine particulate matter that contributes to lung cancer deaths in nonsmokers. Using data from a large American Cancer Society database, the researchers concluded that even tiny amounts of increased carcinogens in air pollution significantly increased the risk. . . .

In addition to environmental factors, a report by Everyday Health in October pointed to ethnicity as a risk factor as well, citing a study which showed that non-smoking African-Americans and Asians who live in Japan and Korea -- but not the United States -- died more frequently from lung cancer than those of European descent.

Non-smoking women also seem to be more vulnerable than non-smoking men.

Jump to full article »

Why did Hitchens continue to smoke & drink during treatment? 

The death, from esophageal cancer, of Christopher Hitchens, the brilliant and often controversial writer and journalist, has prompted me to write this blog. . . .

Given the high IQs of Hitchens, Douglas, and my late colleague, cancer specialist Dr. Eve Wiltshaw, who died, still smoking, of cigarette-related bladder cancer, intelligence probably has little to do with it. So what does?

Addiction is one major cause. Another is the enabling behaviour of a spouse; Michael Douglas’ wife, actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, also smokes. If the partner continues to practice the same bad habit, it obviously hinders the cancer patient from quitting!

A third factor is the belief that “it is too late to quit”, i.e., once the diagnosis has been made, stopping a bad habit is futile because the damage has already been done. Yet, the facts refute that premise.

For example, in a review of 10 studies, published last year in the British Medical Journal, researchers found that those who stopped smoking after a diagnosis of early-stage lung cancer had a 50 per cent lower risk of recurrence and death than people who continued to smoke

Jump to full article »

Cigars, cognac and mass starvation: 10 facts that divide North Korea from the world 

Kim Jong Il had a taste for cigars, cognac and gourmet cuisine, while four in five of North Korean children suffer from malnutrition because food is poorly distributed.

Jump to full article »

Kim Jong Il dead: North Korean dictator's life in pictures 

North Korea dictator Kim Jong Il has died aged 69 after suffering heart failure.

The "Dear Leader", as he was known, suffered a heart attack on board a train on Saturday December 17 after what has been described as "great mental and physical strain" during a "high intensity field inspection". . . .

He also banned cigarettes across the whole country after being told he had to quit smoking in 2007 . . .

Jump to full article »

• Stress, risk factors may have caused death 

The official Korean Central News Agency announced Monday that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il died Saturday of a heart attack.

He was also reported to have suffered from several mental and physical problems.

The deceased "Dear Leader" is believed to have suffered from various diseases throughout his life, while speculation about his ill health and even possible death have lingered for more than five years.

In 2007, he was absent from public view for more than 100 days. Sources claimed that he had received heart surgery in May that year. . . .

In August this year, Kim looked much healthier after gaining some weight. In 120 pictures released by the North, Kim was spotted smoking. . . .

Kim was also a heavy smoker and had a taste for cigars, sources said.

All such conditions are well-known risk factors for heart disorders, said Ahn Chul-woo of Gangnam Severance Hospital.

Jump to full article »