Tobacco Products with Less Toxic Smoke, a New Experiment
Published on May 18, 2009 3:56 AM
In Germany, British American Tobacco enrolled 250 volunteers for to test cigarettes designed to produce less toxic smoke than usual tobacco products.
A lot of studies showed that smoking cigarettes contains many carcinogens. For example, benzepyrene, 2-naphthylamine, and 4-aminobiphenyl are metabolized by the body’s P450 system to form reactive substances that can chemically interact with DNA nucleotides and cause mutations. It recently has been shown that a reactive metabolite of benzepyrene can mutagenize hot spots in the p53 gene, which have been associated with lung cancer. That’s why BAT wants to produce cigarettes with less toxic smoke.
The investigated smokers' reactions will be analyzed through a battery of scientific tests. Researchers will measure the levels of cigarette chemicals in their blood, urine and saliva.
The BAT plan is to produce cigs that can be marketed as less likely to cause disease. But Tobacco Industry are cautious now of requiring less harmful products because in the 1970s and 80s were also produced safe cigarettes which were not safe. They were promoted as being safer on the basis of laboratory tests with "smoking machines", but turned out to be just as dangerous as traditional products because consumers puffed harder to get their hit of smoke and nicotine.
However, BAT has made three exemplars of safe cigs for the German trial. They included tobacco that has been processed in several ways to generate fewer "toxicants" as it burns, including treatment with enzymes similar to those in biological washing powders. The prototypes also have new filters, with activated charcoal and tar to absorb harmful chemicals.
Although the Tobacco Industry has been investigated cigarette safety for decades, science has only now reached a phase at which researchers can discover how to make smoking sincerely safer.
BAT really wants to make such cigarettes because it knows that there are 100 or so toxicants in cigarette smoke and more than 30 significant diseases are associated with smoking.
