Do you have a light? It’s 10:00 am, and all over New York City, office workers are headed outside. They’ve checked their email, drank their morning cup(s) of coffee, and had their morning meetings. Now they’ll ride the elevators down to the lobbies of their buildings, push the doors open and step outside. And in [...]

Trails of acrid grey mist hang in the air. I use the front of my shirt as an impromptu gas mask as I cough out my drink order to the bartender. Passing through one of these repulsive clouds is an irritating game of “try not to breathe.” The saturated air inside has made it almost [...]

This September, cigarette packs in the U.S. will be getting a lot more colorful. And a lot more disturbing. By then, tobacco companies will be required to display one of nine graphic health warnings on each pack, to comply with the Tobacco Control Act of 2009. The U.S. has followed dozens of other countries in [...]

More than half a million people died from cancer in the U.S. in 2011. We have many astounding advances in medicine to thank for that number not being higher. But that grim figure could also be a lot lower even without a breakthrough drug for breast or lung cancer. In fact, more than 280,000 of [...]

Heart disease is the leading killer in the U.S., and more than 27 million Americans currently have a cardiac condition. But what is your risk of developing heart disease at some point in your entire life? It might be a lot higher than you think, according to a new paper published online Wednesday in The [...]

In 2009 California took in $839 million in taxes from the sale of cigarettes. And with its—and many other states’—budget in dire straights, it is hard to turn down any extra income. But that’s just what the state has been doing, with overall cigarette sales dropping year after year thanks to anti-smoking efforts. And these [...]

It once was difficult for people to imagine that smoking might be harmful, as Siddhartha Mukherjee documents in The Emperor of All Maladies (Scribner, 2010). He quotes Oxford epidemiologist Richard Peto, who explained that during the 1940s, when almost all U.S. men smoked, "asking about an association between tobacco and cancer was like asking about [...]

Inhaling cigarette smoke or smoggy air is clearly not great for your health. And exposure to various kinds of smoke has been associated with cardiovascular disease, rheumatoid arthritis and cataracts. Researchers have now pinpointed a compound common in disparate forms of smoke that might explain some of the frequent ills associated with it. The findings [...]

The town of New Ulm, Minn., some 90 miles outside of Minneapolis, is small. With a population of about 15,000, the self-proclaimed polka capital of the U.S. might not seem like the most obvious locale to roll out an aggressive, unconventional attack on heart disease. But for the past couple years, a local health system [...]

Good news for those who think that anti-smoking warning labels aren’t prominent enough on cigarette packs and cartons (bad news for the squeamish though)—the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will require tobacco companies to include blackened lungs, corpses, crying babies and other disturbing images on their products so that smokers fully understand the risks [...]

Cigarette smoke plays an undisputed role in the development of lung and other cancers. Carcinogens in the smoke damage DNA, which often results in mutations in genes that promote the development of cancer. It’s also well known that secondhand smoke can have effects indistinguishable from active smoking. While maternal tobacco smoking has been associated with [...]

Anyone walking into a smoker’s abode can tell you that the traces of tobacco use don’t vanish when a cigarette or cigar is extinguished. But just what happens to this "third-hand" smoke once the air has cleared—and can it still be harmful? A team of researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that remnants [...]

Trails of acrid grey mist hang in the air. I use the front of my shirt as an impromptu gas mask as I cough out my drink order to the bartender. Passing through one of these repulsive clouds is an irritating game of “try not to breathe.” The saturated air inside has made it almost [...]