A new study in JAMA reports that among people who smoke a pack of cigarettes a day for 20 years, the risk of cardiovascular disease returns to that of a nonsmoker for 10-15 years after quitting. Here’s what this means for PM2.5 in outdoor air.
I have covered this issue before here and in Scare Pollution.
Someone who smokes a pack a day for 20 years will smoke 146,000 cigarettes.
Such a smoker will inhale somewhere between 10,000 to 40,000 micrograms of PM2.5 per cigarette — or between 1.46 billion to 5.84 billion micrograms of PM2.5 over those 20 years (3.1 to 12.9 pounds of PM2.5).
So let’s say that some smokes a pack a day from age 20 to 40. By the time they are age 55, their risk of CV disease will be the same as that of a nonsmoker even though they have inhaled 3.1 to 12.9 pounds more of PM2.5.
How can anyone rationally claim that PM2.5 causes death?
The media release is below. The study is here.