Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by mrpg on Monday August 13 2018, @09:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-breathe dept.

A year in Paris is as bad for your health as smoking 183 cigarettes

A study by the European Transport & Environment association published on Friday confirmed that spending a few days in various popular European capitals is equivalent to smoking between one and four cigarettes.

[...] The Transport & Environment study compared the contamination from fine particles of the ten largest European tourist cities by converting it into the number of cigarettes smoked. The NGO used a method of calculation created by Berkeley Earth, an international climate association.


Original Submission

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @10:03AM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @10:03AM (#720882)

    Reminds me of a Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] I read years ago:

    A micromort (from micro- and mortality) is a unit of risk defined as one-in-a-million chance of death. Micromorts can be used to measure riskiness of various day-to-day activities. A microprobability is a one-in-a million chance of some event; thus a micromort is the microprobability of death.

    In particular, the example list is amusing:

    for example an additional one micromort from …

            Drinking 0.5 liter of wine (cirrhosis of the liver)
            Smoking 1.4 cigarettes (cancer, heart disease)
            Spending 1 hour in a coal mine (black lung disease)
            Spending 3 hours in a coal mine (accident)
            Living 2 days in New York or Boston in 1979 (air pollution)
            Living 2 months with a smoker (cancer, heart disease)
            Drinking Miami water for 1 year (cancer from chloroform)
            Eating 100 charcoal-broiled steaks (cancer from benzopyrene)
            Travelling 6000 miles (10,000 km) by jet (cancer due to increased background radiation)

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by FatPhil on Monday August 13 2018, @10:25AM (2 children)

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday August 13 2018, @10:25AM (#720889) Homepage
      So it takes a trillion of them to give you one Megadeth? Fuck, looks like I've got my work cut out...
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @11:40AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @11:40AM (#720910)

        Make us proud, FatPhil. We know you can do it.

      • (Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday August 13 2018, @12:45PM

        by MostCynical (2589) on Monday August 13 2018, @12:45PM (#720937) Journal

        Being kicked out of Metallica could probably be considered an anti-mort.
        https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DoA1bBmxwrUU [youtube.com]

        --
        "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
    • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday August 13 2018, @11:28AM (2 children)

      by PiMuNu (3823) on Monday August 13 2018, @11:28AM (#720909)

      How many micromorts does one acquire from taking a taxi in Naples? Or cycling in downtown New York?

    • (Score: 2) by legont on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:25AM

      by legont (4179) on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:25AM (#721207)

      How about an optimistic list (microimmorta)
                      Drinking 0.5 liter of wine (reducing stress)
                      Smoking 1.4 cigarettes (increasin cognitive abilities leading to higher salary and better doctors)
                      Spending 1 hour in a coal mine (training for high level corporate position)
                      Spending 3 hours in a coal mine (passing the test for a CIO)
                      Living 2 days in New York or Boston in 1979 (salary->doctors)
                      Living 2 months with a smoker (are you going to? really?)
                      Drinking Miami water for 1 year (screw Cubans)
                      Eating 100 charcoal-broiled steaks (permanent hard-on)
                      Travelling 6000 miles (10,000 km) by jet (fucking 20 Thai ladies using power from above -> happiness, position, money, doctors, immortality)

      --
      "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @10:21AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @10:21AM (#720887)

    That article doesn't even tell us the actual results of the statistics. I mean, how hard can it be to list ten cities together with their cigarette equivalents? Or at least link to the actual study, so we can find out for ourselves.

    Also strange is that the article on one hand states that the study "compared the contamination from fine particles of the ten largest European tourist cities by converting it into the number of cigarettes smoked" but the article earlier lists Beijing, which last I checked wasn't an European city.

    Also, some bad on the submitter: While for the original publication the headline made sense, because it is a French publication and thus Paris is probably the most relevant of the cities for them, the same title makes absolutely no sense in the context of this site, which is not France-centric, since the article explicitly mentions that Paris is not the worst of the tested cities: They cite Prague as worse (they don't say if it was the worst European city, though). So it would have been a good idea to change the title in this case (in most cases, it's OK to keep the original title, but in this case, it decidedly isn't).

    A quick web search gave me this article [berkeleyearth.org] which I'm pretty sure is one of the original sources used by the article linked from the summary, and contains much better information. However it also doesn't compare "the contamination from fine particles of the ten largest European tourist cities" — but it doesn't claim to.

    I couldn't find the source on Transport & Environment; however this article [dailymail.co.uk] has a bit more information (BTW, either Prague or Istanbul is the worst of the ten European cities; the one-digit rounded numbers in the image [only visible with JavaScript] don't let you tell — interestingly, for London it gives three significant digits, which lets me assume that the original source also had that precision).

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Monday August 13 2018, @10:27AM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday August 13 2018, @10:27AM (#720890) Homepage
      F24 did a poor job, yes. DDG, however, finds the study trivially - I've added 2 links to the summary (to the agency, and to the report), and for those who want the raw stats, the data's here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1R2GyjHfkDtx_tOO9OBuWnGUhkCKEGrbGpkyf-gDxSsA/edit?usp=sharing
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday August 13 2018, @12:41PM (2 children)

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday August 13 2018, @12:41PM (#720935) Journal

      It'd be really interesting to consider micromorts for supposed "risks" that freak out many people vs. other everyday behaviors that no one worries about.

      A couple examples: lots of pregnant women have a long list of foods they worry about consuming. But when my wife was pregnant and we were in Europe for a while, I did detailed research because she wanted to enjoy some of the stuff there. And some of the "conventional wisdom" for these risks were actually about things for which the risks were astonishly low (like the chance of getting listeria from that food while pregnant was less likely than getting struck by lightning at the moment you bought a winning Powerball ticket).

      Meanwhile, everyday behavior about food risks and food safety isn't questioned. What's the micromort number for leaving frozen meat on the counter to thaw -- bet it's low but still a lot higher than those supposed pregnancy food "risks." Or what about food bags? Reusable grocery bags are known to carry a lot of bacteria and can accumulate huge amounts if never cleaned or washed (which the vast majority of people don't do). It's good for the environment to not use disposable plastic bags, but how many micromorts are you accumulating?

      Another example I remember looking into after that kid was born: SIDS risk. So many parents are on"high alert" in the first few months due to so many campaigns about SIDS. But what if they compared the micromorts for SIDS risk factors to everyday stuff like micromorts for driving your baby to the store or to daycare. Pretty sure you might think twice about making sure you're alert and being careful while driving if people compared these stats rationally.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday August 13 2018, @02:07PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 13 2018, @02:07PM (#720977)

        What's the micromort number for leaving frozen meat on the counter to thaw

        To some extent that's apples and oranges in that you're vastly more likely to spend 24-48 hours in the bathroom feeling like you're gonna die, vs actually dying, of most food poisoning incidents.

        I don't follow reasonable food safety guidelines to avoid death, but to avoid the vastly more likely outcome of feeling like death for a day or two.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @02:36PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @02:36PM (#720990)

        How many cases of SIDS are women exercising their right to choose in the fourth trimester?

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @10:47AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @10:47AM (#720898)

    I tell you. I've been to Paris airports couple of times and those events alone made my life shorter about 15 years. For that reason i would never even want to visit Paris itself.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @09:15AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @09:15AM (#721297)

      Charles de Gaulle :F

  • (Score: 4, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 13 2018, @11:11AM (4 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 13 2018, @11:11AM (#720903) Journal

    Tonight in the news, studies have found that living leads to death in an amazing 100% of cases examined. Tune in to News at Eleven for more details!

    • (Score: 5, Funny) by pe1rxq on Monday August 13 2018, @01:52PM (1 child)

      by pe1rxq (844) on Monday August 13 2018, @01:52PM (#720967) Homepage

      Actually due to the enormous amount of people alive today there is some hope: in the entire existence of the the human race some 100+ billion people have died and some 7+billion are still alive.
      So for a member of the human species there is still a significant chance of living forever.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:52PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:52PM (#721386)

        I think I'm one of those who live forever. I mean, there have been more than a billion seconds so far which I've survived, and zero which I didn't survive. So obviously there's an extremely low probability of dying. ;-)

    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 13 2018, @04:32PM (1 child)

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday August 13 2018, @04:32PM (#721030)

      -1 Stupid and misses the point.

      Life is indeed full of danger and risk and eventually ends in death. That doesn't mean you should speed up the process unnecessarily by doing idiotic things that have no benefit, such as smoking cigarettes. Here in the US, we're actually pretty good on this point: we've really cut down smoking a lot in our population, compared to just a few decades ago. The Koreans and Europeans are much, much worse on this than we are (though, to be fair, their idiocy in continuing to use tobacco is actually good for our economy since tobacco is grown in the southeast US and is a big export for us).

      We're also doing better than the Europeans (and Chinese) on auto pollution: the Euros stupidly adopted policies that favor using diesel for car engines, instead of gasoline, because of its somewhat higher fuel economy. But this comes at the cost of particulate and NOx emissions. Gasoline is much cleaner-burning than diesel, and doesn't need things like particulate filters (which rob performance and economy, so some owners illegally bypass them) or urea injection. So European cities actually have much worse pollution now than American cities, even though we have more cars per capita.

      Trying to keep things clean and stay healthy so you can enjoy a long, healthy life is not a bad thing.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @10:53PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @10:53PM (#721158)

        How do you figure "no benefit"? The effects of nicotine are well documented, and very pleasant in my opinion.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday August 13 2018, @01:18PM (4 children)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Monday August 13 2018, @01:18PM (#720945) Homepage Journal

    I lived in France for the summer of '93 while I wrote my UCSC Senior Thesis on the french side of CERN.

    Our entire collaboration's office building reeked of cigarettes. Across the hall from me was this Texan graduate student who smoked a cigar every day at lunchtime - in his office.

    Beer and wine were served not just in the cafeteria at lunchtime but also at 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM from our office building's cafe. No one seemed to care that or experimental hall was chock full 'o ways to experience workplace accidents. I'm not talking cancer from walking through the particle beam, I'm talking tripping over a cable, falling off a walkway then smashing your skull on the floor.

    Our building was equipped with a water fountain that was connected to the public water supply.

    I was the only one who ever drank from it. When others witnessed me do so they looked at me as if I was out of my mind.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 13 2018, @04:35PM (2 children)

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday August 13 2018, @04:35PM (#721034)

      Maybe you are out of your mind. For all the things the US does badly, we are pretty good with tap water quality in most places. Other countries really aren't. Not everything in Europe is better than in America. There's no way I'd assume the water quality in any other country, except maybe Japan, is up to US par, without doing some research on it. Even here in the US, the tap water frequently doesn't taste very good and I wouldn't use it without some kind of filter.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @08:01AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @08:01AM (#721275)

        When I was in St. Petersberg, water came out of the faucets with literal chunks with what looked like green fuzzy things on them. In no small quantity. People lived their entire lives without drinking straight water. It was always boiled to be turned into tea for consumption.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @03:03PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @03:03PM (#721391)

        According to this page, [tripsavvy.com] tap water is safe to drink in France (and in fact, in most but not all European countries).

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Monday August 13 2018, @05:19PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Monday August 13 2018, @05:19PM (#721053)

      > I'm not talking cancer from walking through the particle beam

      Not quite right: Walking near the particle beam gives cancer. Walking through the particle beam would cut you in half.
      https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/astrophysics/cern-to-start-up-the-large-hadron-collider-now-heres-how-it-plans-to-stop-it [ieee.org]

      researchers found that an 86-microsecond exposure of the beam would bore a hole 40 meters into a block of copper.

  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 13 2018, @02:04PM (4 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 13 2018, @02:04PM (#720975)

    compared the contamination from fine particles

    If muslim invader terror attacks are a major problem, you gotta tranquilize the population with some nice calming traditional anti-cigarette propaganda.

    Just saying you're more likely to die in a hail of gunfire or under a truck wheel than get lung cancer in 50 years merely because you wanted to see the Eiffel Tower on vacation.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @03:23PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @03:23PM (#721007)

      Don't be so sure. Both are about one in a million chances.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @04:21PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @04:21PM (#721025)

      Two quick googles later and I have the numbers:

      Odds of dying (as a woman) from heart attack between 50 and 60 (that is a 50 year old woman dying of heart attack before age 60) go from 0.4% to 1.3%.
      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK126159/ [nih.gov]

      Odds of dying to ANY terrorist threat in Paris in your lifetime: 1 in 4,984,301, at is 0.00002%
      https://www.cato.org/blog/european-terrorism-fatalities-annual-chance-being-murdered [cato.org]

      So cigarettes increase your chance of heart attack in the next 10 years by 0.7% (I'm not even going to bother with cancer here because I don't have to), while a Paris resident has a 0.00002% chance of dying in a terrorist attack. I'm sorry, but the scales aren't even close. Terrorism is a blip, a useful political tool, not a real threat.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @07:01PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @07:01PM (#721103)

        These stats arent at all comparable. The percent of people who die directly due to smoking cigarettes (eg take a puff and choke on the smoke) is near zero.

        Just wait until "long term health effects of terrorism" becomes one of those issues pushed by academia. They will find a way to link all sorts of deaths to terrorism, the same as they have to the current boogeyman of cigarettes. The only thing stopping this is that apparently no one is interested in funding it right now.

        Do people who watch a lot of "terrorism" documentaries/news have heart attacks more often at younger ages than those that don't? I bet they do...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @11:56PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @11:56PM (#721176)

      Both are unnecessary deaths. One is more unnecessary than the other: Islam is already illegal in European countries only the laws are not enforced at all. Colonies of islamist settlers are catered to in stead.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @05:59PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @05:59PM (#721071)

    They need to verify this with human testing like in the US. They can say how deadly it is when that position is convenient, and how minor the danger is when that's convenient:

    So if this is the case, why did EPA fail to warn their test subjects that the substances they would be exposed to in high doses were so dangerous? While the administration has repeatedly told Congress and the public that PM2.5 can kill within hours of exposure, they only told them, for example, that “You may experience some minor degree of airway irritation, cough or shortness of breath or wheezing. These symptoms typically disappear two to four hours after exposure, but may last longer for particularly sensitive people.”

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/11/13/epa-charged-with-lethal-experiments-on-hundreds-of-unsuspecting-subjects/ [forbes.com]

(1)