Tougher smoking warnings

You know how, if you're in the habit or the business of looking things up, how easy it is to get sidetracked by some fascinating topic that lies alphabetically next to the thing you're supposed to be looking up or, as the Americans say, researching.

I had a tough time the other day with my tenth volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica because it's the volume which has printed boldly on the spine, Garrison to Halibut. I was looking up the short biography of George V but didn't get around to him until, once for all, I'd satisfied my long, unsatisfied curiosity about these two end pieces.

The garrison turned out to be not about troops stationed in a town or a fortress, but about a particular man, William Lloyd Garrison, an early nineteenth-century man from Massachusetts who became a famous name in the north and a name execrated in the south, almost as much as the name of Lincoln. Garrison was the leader of the so-called abolitionists and, when, at the end of the Civil War, slavery was abolished, Garrison declared his duty was done and abolished the anti-slavery society. He died in New York 105 years ago today. That's a pure coincidence.

And, oh yes! I knew his great grand-daughter. That's all, I think, ye need to know about William Lloyd Garrison.

But, how about, I thought, halibut? Of course, I know halibut. It was one of the few fish that we had when I was a boy which varied the dreary alternative, to me dreary, anyway, of plaice or fluke, but did I know that the halibut is more accurately known as Hippoglossus hippoglossus? I didn't. Or that the eggs are only three and a half millimetres in diameter, that the finished product, so to speak, can live well into his twenties and can be several hundred pounds in weight and over five feet long. Not any I ever saw or caught in the Irish Sea. But, ah, the big babies, wouldn't you know, are caught off the Pacific coast of North America which provides over 70 per cent of the total annual commercial catch of 90 million pounds.

Well, that's the halibut and what more we don't know about him, surely won't harm us.

A day later, I was feeling a little surge of guilt at not having talked for a couple of months or so about the presidential election, but lots of you will be relieved to hear that I managed to suppress that guilt and decide we won't touch topic A until all the main primaries are over, two weeks from now.

However I was checking the details of the 1952 conventions when my eye caught, under historical events of that year, a press conference which I attended called by one Dr Keiler Hammond. My paper did not then make a point of covering medical conferences, let alone press conferences called by one doctor, but Dr Hammond was in charge of a research project undertaken two years previously by the American Cancer Society. As I recall, no results were going to be published for five years but at the end of two years, the society had made such dramatic and disturbing findings that, in the public interest, it felt duty bound to publish them. I got wind of this and was on hand when Dr Hammond, who was in charge of the research, made his first, stunning announcement.

It was that cigarette smoking had proved to be a leading cause of cancer of the lung and, quite possibly, could also have much to do with heart disease in smokers. I wrote up these results at great length and, shortly afterwards, I went down to Florida to visit an old Long Island neighbour who'd retired to Key Biscayne, an idyllic little peninsula south of Miami and quite unknown to fame until 20 years later we knew it as the Florida retreat of one Richard M. Nixon and his buddy Bebe Rebozo.

My old neighbour was then just on 90 – a frail, but wiry little grasshopper of a man who weighed not much more than seven, I should say, eight stone at most. He had, as we say, all his marbles and as he rolled them out impressively, he also had at his elbow, always, a pack of cigarettes. The filter business had not come in then. No, these were the original, lethal type. He smoked them almost continuously. He was a subscriber to the transatlantic weekly edition of my paper and he'd read my pieces. 'What are you going to do about it?' I asked him. 'Well,' he said, 'I went to my doctor and he said if you stop smoking even now, you will probably lengthen your life.' 'By about how much?' The doctor pondered. 'By about maybe three weeks.' 'I thought a long time', the old man said, 'and I said to myself the heck with it.'

Well, this, needless to say, is a story that the tobacco companies would love but old Nathaniel Foster, he died about three years later, was a freak, a wild and lucky exception. Down the years – goodness, down three decades – the research has been repeated and extended in a dozen countries and its conclusions are overwhelming. As the Surgeon General of the United States said last Wednesday, in simply the latest declaration of a public health authority, 'We now estimate that between 80 and 90 per cent of the chronic lung disease in this country is directly attributed to cigarette smoking and we can say again, with greater certainty than ever, that cigarettes are the most important individual health risk in this country responsible for more premature deaths and disability than any other known agent.'

He said something else, however, which will certainly brew a fine storm of controversy and, I should guess, thousands of law suits around the country, from non-smokers who come within breathing distance of cigarette smoke however widely diffused. Dr Koop – he is the Surgeon General – was holding a press conference to deliver a 500-page report on cigarette smoking which now represents the government's official beliefs.

To the coming dismay, I should imagine, of restaurant owners, airplane companies, the builders of waiting rooms and any other entrepreneur who gathers two or three together, there was a short chapter nestling in those 500 pages which somebody spied and dragged into public view. It said in some that non-smokers, too, can suffer various similar ills from association with smokers. Children whose parents smoke have more bronchitis and pneumonia early in life than the children of parents who don't and there follows other evidence.

Oh well, it's only fair to say, at this point, that the Tobacco Institute of America quotes other studies which dispute the Surgeon General's report. So, there, I'd better say that there follows other claims as, for instance, that of a Japanese study which finds slight increases in bronchitis and emphysema among wives of smokers as against wives of non-smokers. The general claim is that there's such a thing as illness from what they call passive smoke or passive smoking – from, that is, being in an atmosphere that receives cigarette smoke.

Well, another government department, the National Institute of Health, no less, has also made studies which conclude in this way. 'A review of the data which addresses the effect of passive smoking on the respiratory system suggests that the effect varies from negligible to quite small.'

But some communities have already started to move fearing the worst of these studies. San Francisco recently passed an ordinance that compels offices to have separate quarters for smokers and non-smokers. Several suits have been brought by individuals to make airlines have separate compartments, not just cubic space and some have done it, but one small airline which would have had to redesign its small planes won its case as the defendant.

Now Congress, of course, had wind of the Surgeon General's latest report and a move started at once to strengthen the warning that must be printed on all cigarette packages and on all cigarette advertisements. It has for several years now been both sad and ridiculous to see the brave efforts of the advertising companies in full-page ads showing you splendid manly types out shooting moose or camping in the mountains or riding the prairie, symbols meant to take the curse off the prominent white rectangle which says, 'Warning, the Surgeon General has determined that cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health'.

Well, Congress is now about to vote a new compulsory warning to replace the old, one which could say, cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, emphysema, heart disease and other respiratory ills. There are variant suggestions but the new one will be just about as tough as the one I suggested.

This is rough on the senators and congressmen who come from states – the Carolinas more than any – whose economy is practically rooted in tobacco, but every straw poll shows that the new warnings will be passed by huge majorities.

Since we're on this cheerful subject of health and what can impair it, there is a new, exhaustive and – to some people – gloomy, study just out from the United States Department of Agriculture. It's a study of America's changing diet habits between 1950 and 1983. This covers the whole population. It was, I think, some time at the end of the Fifties that we first heard the dread word 'cholesterol' – the waxy substance which helps produce certain hormones and we always wished it well. Our own bodies create the necessary stuff until we heard that certain foods, and for some nations, the staff of life, dangerously increase cholesterol, producing fatty deposits in the blood vessels that can cause stoppages and heart attacks.

Well, since 1950, Americans have eaten remarkably less of the villainous foods that contain saturated fats and, therefore, cholesterol. Since 1950, 32 per cent fewer eggs, one-third less whole milk, half as much butter, 80 per cent less lard. However, they do eat 50 per cent more beef than they used to and, considering the succulent quality of American beef, I think this is the last suspect they're likely to give up.

But, Americans, on the whole, have strikingly changed their diets in the direction of more vegetables, fibre and fruits. And, to let in a little glimmer of light on this dark subject, today, the incidence of heart attacks in this country is down more than 20 per cent since 1950.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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