Radioactive polonium present in cigarette: expert

NEW DELHI: You don't have to be a Russian spy to be poisoned by polonium. It is right there in the cigarette you puff.

Ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko's death due to polonium made big news, but few realise that the same polonium is also present in cigarette smoke, and is one of the main causes of lung cancer in smokers.

"Cigarette smoke contains radioactivity. Smokers slowly poison themselves and also the passive smokers with polonium 210 and lead 210, two radioactive materials. They do not suffer from any acute radiation disease as the Russian spy but may develop an increased risk of lung cancer," says Dr KS Parthasarathy, former secretary, Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB).

Different specialists arrive at different values for the dose, but Dr Sajeela Maini, President, Tobacco Control Association of India says the risk cannot be ignored.

The association has in fact filed a PIL against the government and is asking for a total ban on the manufacture and sale of cigarettes.

Many NGOs and health bodies had earlier approached the government urging that it direct the cigarette manufacturers to label the amount of nicotine and tar present in it.

But she says, most people don't know that cigarette smoke also contains carbon monoxide and radioactive substance like polonium and lead.

"One puff of cigarette contains 4800 chemicals out of which 69 are carcinogens. And the smoke which a passive smoke inhales contains no less than 400 of these chemicals." 

Burning makes these chemicals more dangerous and carcinogenic and thus the smoke is more harmful, she says.

Lighted cigarettes produce polonium and insoluble lead in the mainstream. Smokers inhale them deep into their lungs.

The airways branch into narrower and narrower passageways. The particles of smoke bearing radioactive residues get deposited at these branches.

These hotspots deliver high radiation doses. Most lung cancers are formed in these regions, Dr Parthasarathy, also a nuclear radiation expert, says.

In 1982, hundreds of smokers stopped the habit after reading an article `Radioactivity in Cigarette Smoke' in the New England Journal of Medicine.

TH  Winters and JR DiFranza of the University of Massachussets Medical Centre wrote that cigarette contains radioactivity in the form of polonium-210 and lead-210, notes Dr Parthasarathy.

The report claimed that a person smoking one-and-a half pack of cigarettes per day receives a dose to certain regions of the lung equal to 300 X-Ray films of chest per year.

According to TC Rao, a former researcher at the US Department of Agriculture, radioactivity in tobacco came from phosphatic fertilisers, which contained uranium and its decay product radium 226.

This radium decays into a number of products including polonium 210 and lead 210.

Tobacco roots may absorb some radioactivity from soil.

However, Dr Parthasarathy notes that Indian farmers do not use phosphatic fertilisers. Scientists at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre have shown that polonium 210 levels in Indian tobacco are 10-15 times lower than those in American tobacco.

He quotes Dr Ravenholt, a former director of World Health Surveys at the US Centers for Disease Control, that Americans receive more radiation from tobacco smoke than from any other source.