In Avenue des Champs-Élysées, the most prestigious avenue in Paris, France, famous for its cinemas, cafés, and luxury specialty shops, cigarette butts sit at the streets. When the authorities here banned smoking inside cafes, little did they know they were creating another hazard: the wanton disposal of cigarette butts, propelled mainly by the absence of public ashtrays.

When smokers toss away cigarette butts onto street pavements or out into the open landscape, little do they know how much damage that can inflict onto the environment. Apart from harm to the environment, many minors tend to experiment with smoking on cigarette butts which makes it all the more important to dispose them away properly.

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By Lester R. Brown

http://www.earthpolicy.org/Books/Seg/PB3ch07_ss4.htm

Ensuring basic health care for people in low-income countries is critical to the Plan B goal of eradicating poverty and stabilizing population.

While heart disease and cancer (largely the diseases of aging), obesity, and smoking dominate health concerns in industrial countries, in developing countries infectious diseases are the overriding health concern. Besides AIDS, the principal diseases of concern are diarrhea, respiratory illnesses, tuberculosis, malaria, and measles. Child mortality is high.

Progress in reaching the United Nations (U.N.) Millennium Development Goal of reducing child mortality two thirds by 2015 is lagging badly. As of 2005 only 32 of 147 developing countries are on track to reach this goal. In 23 countries child mortality has either remained unchanged or risen. And only 2 of the World Bank’s 35 fragile states are on track to meet this goal by 2015.

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As if you need one more reason to avoid those nasties…
Smoking during pregnancy leads to offspring with more physically violent behavior.  I’m guessing it’s their way of saying later: “Mama! What the heck were you thinking?!”

University of Montreal psychiatry professor Dr. Jean Séguin said of the findings,

It affects the nervous system of the children in many ways, and this is one of them. It makes the kid harder to manage.

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Smoke on clothing, carpets and furniture is much more than a nasty smell, however. According to the New York Times, the smoke is a toxic brew of “heavy metals, carcinogens and even radioactive materials that young children can get on their hands and ingest, especially if they’re crawling or playing on the floor.”

Researchers have labeled it “third hand smoke.” What exactly is it? According to the Scientific American, “”Third-hand smoke is tobacco smoke contamination that remains after the cigarette has been extinguished,” says Jonathan Winickoff, a pediatrician at the Dana–Farber/Harvard Cancer Center in Boston and author of a study on the new phenomenon published in the journal Pediatrics.”

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In the late 90’s, cigarette makers experienced the kind of market boom in Asia that they hadn’t seen in the USA in years. Big tobacco enjoyed a tightening grip on Asian asian wallets and lungs; things were looking good. But in the last decade, an emerging health consciousness, popularly known as the wellbeing trend, has threatened to send the plans of cigarette makers up in smoke.

South Korea, for one, has seen a precipitous drop in smoking. In 2000, 70-80 percent of South Korean men were smokers. That number has tumbled to around 40% today. It’s no Bhutan, which banned all tobacco in 2004, but that’s still an impressive improvement. Why the sudden decrease in smoking?

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80% of the studies reviewed link greater exposure to media with negative health effects for kids and adolescents.

Common Sense Media published the report, Media and Child and Adolescent Health: A Systematic Review, which reviewed 173 of the best studies from the last 30 years which examine the connection between media exposure and negative health effects on children.

The average modern child spends nearly 45 hours a week with television, movies, magazines, music, the Internet, cellphones and video games, the study reported. By comparison, children spend 17 hours a week with their parents on average and 30 hours a week in school, the study said.

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It is estimated that several trillion cigarette butts are littered worldwide each year. In the US, and around the world, it is wins the "most littered item" prize.

The butts are harmful to wildlife and have been found in the stomachs of fish, birds, and whales. Plus, those toxic chemicals that the filter was designed to keep from entering the body, stay there - until, of course, the butt reaches a body of water and the chemicals start to leak out. Tossed cigarette butts are also the cause of countless fires.

So what can we do?

If you are a smoker, dispose of your butts properly. You might even want to consider a pocket ashtray. As The Smoking Section says, "Considerate smokers don't litter. Those who do deserve criticism as much as any other litterer."

If you don't smoke, but know someone who does, and litters along with it, send them an anonymous email letting them know the facts.

We can all do our part by picking up litter, including cigarette butts, and getting them to a trash can. Better that we do it than to allow the litter to continue to harm the environment.

Rebecca says: I hope that some of you readers will send some anonymous emails (or just speak with your friends directly). I'd love to hear your thoughts in this issue. Leave a comment!

Resources:

CigaretteLitter.org

Cigarette Butt Litter

Keep America Beautiful:Cigarette Litter Prevention Program

One of the international community’s finest hours came with the eradication of smallpox, an effort led in the United Nations by the World Health Organization (WHO). This successful elimination of a feared disease, which required a worldwide immunization program, saves not only millions of lives but also hundreds of millions of dollars each year in smallpox vaccination programs and billions of dollars in health care expenditures. This achievement alone may justify the existence of the United Nations.

Similarly, a WHO-led international coalition has waged a worldwide campaign to wipe out polio, a disease that has crippled millions of children. Since 1988, Rotary International has contributed an extraordinary $600 million to this effort. Under this coalition-sponsored Global Polio Eradication Initiative, the number of polio cases worldwide dropped from some 350,000 per year in 1988 to fewer than 800 in 2003.

Unfortunately, progress against polio has begun to backslide. In mid-2003 religious leaders in northern Nigeria began to oppose the vaccination program on the grounds that it was a plot to spread AIDS and sterility. As a result, the number of cases of polio in Nigeria increased rapidly, tripling over the next three years. Meanwhile, Nigerian Muslims making their annual pilgrimage to Mecca may have spread the disease, bringing it back to some countries, such as Indonesia, Chad, and Somalia, that were already polio-free. In 2008 more than 1,600 cases were reported worldwide, and at present polio is still endemic in four countries: Nigeria, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

One of the more remarkable health success stories is the near eradication of guinea worm disease, a global campaign launched by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 1980 and now led by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and the Carter Center. These worms, whose larvae are ingested by drinking unfiltered water from lakes and rivers, mature in a person’s body, sometimes reaching more than two feet in length, and then exit slowly through the skin in a very painful and debilitating ordeal that can last several weeks. The global campaign has reduced the number of people infected by the worm from 3.5 million in 1986 to 25,217 cases in 2006-an astounding drop of 99 percent.

Some leading sources of premature death are lifestyle-related, such as smoking. WHO estimates that 5.4 million people died in 2005 of tobacco-related illnesses, more than from any single infectious disease. Today there are some 25 known health threats that are linked to tobacco use, including heart disease, stroke, respiratory illness, and many forms of cancer. Cigarette smoke kills more people each year than all other air pollutants combined-more than 5 million versus 3 million.

Impressive progress is being made in reducing cigarette smoking. After a century-long buildup of the tobacco habit, the world is turning away from cigarettes, led by WHO’s Tobacco Free Initiative. This gained further momentum when the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the first international accord to deal entirely with a health issue, was adopted unanimously in Geneva in May 2003. Among other things, the treaty calls for raising taxes on cigarettes, limiting smoking in public places, and strong health warnings on cigarette packages.

Ironically, the country where tobacco originated is now leading the world away from it. In the United States, the average number of cigarettes smoked per person has dropped from its peak of 2,814 in 1976 to 1,225 in 2006-a decline of 56 percent. Worldwide, where the downturn lags that of the United States by roughly a dozen years, usage has dropped from the historical high of 1,027 cigarettes smoked per person in 1988 to 859 in 2004, a fall of 16 percent. Media coverage of smoking’s health effects, mandatory health warnings on cigarette packs, and sharp increases in cigarette sales taxes have contributed to the steady decline. Indeed, smoking is falling in nearly all the major cigarette-smoking countries, including such strongholds as France, China, and Japan.

Following approval of the Framework Convention in 2003, a number of countries took strong steps to reduce smoking. Ireland imposed a nationwide ban on smoking in workplaces, bars, and restaurants; India banned smoking in public places; and Norway and New Zealand banned smoking in bars and restaurants. Bhutan, a small Himalayan country sandwiched between India and China, has prohibited tobacco sales entirely. More recently, England has forbidden smoking in workplaces and enclosed public spaces, and France has phased in a similar ban.

Looking more broadly, a 2001 WHO study analyzing the economics of health care in developing countries concluded that providing the most basic health care services, the sort that could be supplied by a village-level clinic, would require donor grants averaging just $33 billion per year. In addition to basic services, this $33 billion includes funding for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and for universal childhood vaccinations. Such an effort would yield enormous economic benefits for developing countries and for the world as a whole.

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Adapted from Chapter 7, “Eradicating Povery, Stabilizing Population,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), available for free downloading and purchase at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/index.htm.

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Reah Janise Kauffman

Tel: (202) 496-9290 x 12

E-mail: rjk (at) earthpolicy.org

Research Contact:

Janet Larsen

Tel: (202) 496-9290 x 14

E-mail: jlarsen (at) earthpolicy.org

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