Litvinenko, Polonium-210 and the big tobacco cover-up

The big news about Putin’s involvement in the death of Litvinenko ( Guardian HERE ) reminded me that cigarettes are also radioactive. For decades the tobacco industry has covered up the fact that Polonium-210 is in tobacco.

Muggli and others uncovered this story some years ago:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2509609/

They said:

“Although it has been known for more than 4 decades that tobacco smoke contains the radioactive substance polonium-210 (PO-210), publicity surrounding the poisoning of former KGB agent Alexander V. Litvinenko with PO-210 in 2006 has heightened awareness of its presence in tobacco smoke.1,2 We reviewed internal tobacco industry corporate records made public through litigation to assess cigarette manufacturers’ internal and external activities in response to the presence and potential health effect of PO-210 in cigarettes.

Documents show that the major transnational cigarette manufacturers managed the potential public relations problem of PO-210 in cigarettes by avoiding any public attention to the issue for fear of “waking a sleeping giant.”3 Despite the industry’s long-time strategy of “creating doubt about the health charges without actually denying it,”4internal corporate records suggest that manufacturers avoided drawing attention to the PO-210 issue in the public domain. Documents also show that once manufacturers determined that PO-210 was a constituent of tobacco smoke, they attempted, but failed, to remove it.

Simultaneously, internal research potentially leading to advancements in scientific knowledge was avoided. Similarly, internal experimental results favorable to the tobacco companies were suppressed from publication by company lawyers despite urgings by internal scientists contending that their data contested reports published in the medical literature. Currently, although all the major tobacco companies would likely admit that PO-210 is present in their products, they continue to minimize its importance in smoking and health litigation and remain silent on the issue on their Web sites and in their messages to consumers.”

Author and tobacco expert Robert Proctor said in the New York Times in an article – ‘Puffing on Polonium’ ( HERE ) in 2006,

“WHEN the former K.G.B. agent Alexander V. Litvinenko was found to have been poisoned by radioactive polonium 210 last week, there was one group that must have been particularly horrified: the tobacco industry.

The industry has been aware at least since the 1960s that cigarettes contain significant levels of polonium. Exactly how it gets into tobacco is not entirely understood, but uranium “daughter products” naturally present in soils seem to be selectively absorbed by the tobacco plant, where they decay into radioactive polonium. High-phosphate fertilizers may worsen the problem, since uranium tends to associate with phosphates. In 1975, Philip Morris scientists wondered whether the secret to tobacco growers’ longevity in the Caucasus might be that farmers there avoided phosphate fertilizers.”

This is yet another reason why the content of cigarettes should be regulated in Australia, as all our product is sourced from overseas. Furthermore, the tobacco-free generation proposal should be fast tracked and implemented.

There is more here:

http://ntr.oxfordjournals.org/content/14/1/79.short