Lung cancer ‘risk’ for ex-smokers

Quit Smoking Benefits: Even years after quitting, former smokers still have a raised risk of lung cancer - and now scientists believe they know why. Smoking appears to permanently alter the activity of key genes, even though most cigarette damage is repaired over time.Canadian researchers, writing in the journal BMC Genomics, looked at lung tissue of 24 people.UK experts stressed that giving up still delivers massive health benefits.It has been shown that the poisons in cigarette smoke can alter the activity of genes.

Employers pushing smoking out

Quit Smoking Benefit: The Marlboro Man need not apply.More bosses are banning smoking at work, paying employees to quit, running smoking cessation classes and sometimes even banning smokers outright from the workplace.Throughout the Triangle, employers are not only banning smoking inside, but also on company premises.

Capitol Broadcasting, the Raleigh owner of the Durham Bulls baseball team and WRAL TV and radio stations, on Aug. 1 expanded a ban on indoor smoking to outdoor areas on company property. SAS Institute of Cary and all Triangle hospitals implemented tougher bans in July. SAS, Rex Healthcare, Quintiles Transnational, Blue Cross, GlaxoSmithKline, WakeMed Health & Hospitals and others even forbid employees from lighting up in their own cars in company parking lots.

“Smokers are the new pariah in this society,” said Gale Adcock, director of corporate health benefits at SAS, the Cary software company.

No cigarrete smoking butts

Quit Smoking Benefit: The new Frederick News-Post central facility now nearing completion off Ballenger Creek Pike will be a state-of-the-art publishing center. The large campus will also be a smoke-free one. That includes not only the building itself, but also the grounds, parking lots - even the private vehicles on site. That new rule is by no means exclusive to The News-Post’s new campus.

In fact, it’s starting to show up in a lot of workplaces around the nation, and appears to be an idea whose time has come - though it has taken a while.Older workers can remember the day when smoking was allowed right in the workplace. Employees puffed away at their desks, and those who didn’t smoke or were even physically distressed by tobacco smoke were simply out of luck. Over the years, medical research and statistics on smoking have turned that smoky board room, office space and employee lounge into no-smoking areas.

Tags: ways to stop smoking, stop smoking guide, stop smoking now, quit smoking benefit

Tags: stop smoking now, stop smoking guide, quit smoking benefit, ways to stop smoking