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COMMENTS: Not Curing Helps Kill Smokers
David Burns is the happily named tobacco researcher that CBS' Mark Phillips introduced us to in Dublin. Burns wants to know why cigarette smoking is less lethal in Australia than it is in the United States. Gas-fired drying is his hypothesis. About 50 years ago the practice of hanging tobacco in barns to be cured was discontinued for American cigarettes. Fire-drying, instead of curing, forms nitrosamines in the leaf, a carcinogen that may hike the death rate from cigarettes from 40% of smokers to 50%. In this country, smoking kills 440,000 each year.
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