Study of casinos raises alarm on secondhand smoke

[SecularMotion]

A half-century after a U.S. Surgeon General's report raised the alarm on tobacco, most Americans know that smoking may eventually cause lung cancer. Far less appreciated is what can happen just minutes - 60 seconds, according to some research - after taking in a breath of smoke, even secondhand.

In the bloodstream, platelets are activated and become sticky. They clump together to form clots that can cause a heart attack or stroke. They stick to artery walls, ripping the lining when blood flow increases and interfering with the vessels' ability to expand and contract as needed.

"I'm sure you've heard, 'If you're having a heart attack, take an aspirin,' " said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. "Aspirin is an anti-platelet agent. And what the smoke is doing is exactly the opposite."

His latest research, analyzing ambulance calls from casinos, illustrates the point.

http://articles.philly.com/2013-09-16/news/42083527_1_casinos-secondhand-smoke-smoking-rates

[Politicalboi]

1. LOL!

I guess they don't take in the fact that the person who just had a heart attack just lost everything they have, or maybe they won a lot of money. Both can cause heart rate to skyrocket.

[onehandle]

2. I thought they confirmed that decades ago?

Just another reason I avoid casinos.

The few times I have been to one, it seemed to be full of people on the verge of death.

Hardly the 'sexy' atmosphere that Vegas claims they are.

[Warpy]

3. The only indoor smoking in this city

is in private homes, a few small businesses and casinos on Indian land. It's the desert, so ventilation is likely better there than it is in areas where smoke is recycled endlessly through a closed AC system, but there's still a gray fog in all of them, nasty.

My own bad habits never extended to gambling, so I can be found outdoors enjoying the weather, whatever it is, while I wait for friends to lose everything and come out.

Well, if they survive the smoke. Feh.

[LeftofObama]

4. I think I would rather inhale the second hand smoke than freeze to death in those places.

I love going to the casino from time to time, but for crying out loud turn up the f*cking heat! I've had to take a hooded sweatshirt in the middle of July when it was 100 degrees outside. Christ on a trailer hitch! When my hands start turning purple from the cold in the middle of summer, it's time to go!

[SheilaT]

5. It's the awful cigarette smoke that keeps me from

casinos more than anything else. Yuck.

Even though the casinos have non-smoking areas, you still have to walk past legions of smokers to get to them.

Personally, I have absolutely no sympathy for smokers. The Surgeon General's report came out nearly 50 years ago, and it's not as though the dangers of smoking weren't already well understood before then.

Plus, smokers have absolutely no idea how much they reek. Really. A smoker will come up to me where I work and it's all that I can do not to gag, or make obvious how awful they smell.

[Art_from_Ark]

6. Most smokers start as teenagers

They think smoking is cool and that they will be able to quit whenever they want. My own high school class had kids who started smoking a decade after the surgeon general's report had been made public, I would assume due to peer pressure or perhaps because their parents were smokers. Thank goodness my home was always smoke-free.

[SheilaT]

7. Oh, I know.

The nature of being a teenager is wanting to defy all authority figures coupled with a very strong sense of immortality. Plus of course, anyone who smokes will eventually look older than his or her chronological age, but that takes long enough to happen that when you're fifteen or even thirty, it doesn't seem like that will happen to you either.

[Arugula Latte]

8. I'm amazed that kids still start smoking today -- because of the cost if nothing else.

I get that they don't think or don't care that their health will be affected, but the money! Jeez, you'd have to work almost an hour at a minimum wage job to buy a pack of cigs.

[factsarenotfair]

9. Promotional displays are positioned to make stealing cigarettes easy.

I knew someone who purchased a convenience store about ten years ago and that's what he told me. They make it easy for young people with little money to steal packs of cigarettes so they will get hooked.