A new study of historical documents revealed that tobacco companies knew that cigarettes contained a radioactive substance called polonium-210, but hid that knowledge from the public for over four decades.
Scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles, reviewed 27 previously unanalyzed documents and found that tobacco companies knew about the radioactive content of cigarettes as early as 1959. The companies studied the polonium throughout the 1960s, knew that it caused “cancerous growths” in the lungs of smokers, and even calculated how much radiation a regular smoker would ingest over 20 years. Then, they kept that data secret.
Hrayr Karagueuzian, the study's lead author, said the companies' level of deception surprised him. “They not only knew of the presence of polonium, but also of its potential to cause cancer,” he said. Karagueuzian and his team replicated the calculations that tobacco company scientists described in these documents and found that the levels of radiation in cigarettes would account for up to 138 deaths for every 1,000 smokers over a period of 25 years. The study published online in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research.
Cheryl Healton is the CEO of the American Legacy Foundation, the organization created from the 1998 legal settlement against tobacco companies. She said the knowledge that cigarettes contain radiation is disturbing today, but would have been even more unsettling to Americans in the midst of the Cold War-mindset of the 1950s and 1960s. “This was when we were crawling under our desks during school radiation drills and thinking about building bomb shelters in our backyards,” Healton said. “You probably could not imagine a more ideal time where you would have maximized the impact of that information. Unquestionably, this fact would have reduced smoking if it had been publicized.” She added that most Americans are probably still unaware that cigarettes contain radiation.
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