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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 30, 2001)
;muary30' rief eadsl !XU< ildrefl (AP)- 3lemerit| ,ic(eo(3M chill ay to sefl two sentendj t. Garda, 4] counts, (tie 23 vi th\sOT )Ol. | \e BC*' the c:.' moth^ oys 10^ led Go'' ” andsit verbet up inW f - ioy he "■ ,n Catiit lecialco-' what If “What: ie resdlj ?r took! iled." Tuesday. January 30, 2001 _ scienc TECHN Y THE BATTALION se groups! sued byj ingress act chalM ity of sJ ’used Aim "ii of CM ■ Lynn cal on an a$$| iple thaii lion. lent wasl ’urationi ernmentj lucracy i nn.ana :h of i lep. Cheij e was a ions, wit di serin ms non nnes Urd| ‘derate progrs noCai| a for a til rds said; m i sind By Stuart Hutson ■ ■ The Battalion ™ Dennis Miller recently joked that smoking has become so socially unacceptable that it has even been banned in the cafeteria of the Philip Morris production plant. Everywhere, smokers are being driven from the mass populace to areas designated for those who wish to participate in this can cer-inducing activity. College Station may be the next to jump on the smoke-free bandwagon. A proposal from the Board of Health for Bryan-College Station to eliminate smoking in restaurants between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. will be debated by the Bryan and College Station city councils today. Regardless of the subject matter dis cussed by the representatives of the twin cities, medical specialists at Texas A&M said the discussion comes down to the cities’ will ingness to take a risk. “As a society, we have to ask just how much of a risk we are willing to tolerate,” said Gregg Wells, an assistant professor in the De partment of Pathology and Laboratory Med icine at A&M. “If we decided to get rid of all the 18-wheelers on the roads, the roads would be a safer place. But society accepts the risk. There are vehicles we do not allow, but draw ing that line is usually a difficult choice. “There is a substantial body which shows that there are almost definitely risks associated with smoking and second-hand smoke, but evaluating those risks is a difficult task,” he said The problem with evaluation Wells said the main difficulty of examin ing the risks of second-hand smoke lies with determining the level of exposure a person has had to the smoke. “It is easy to set up a laboratory condition in which you expose a rat with a quantified amount of smoke and then observe the direct result,” he said. “But in real-life settings, there are a lot of other factors that come into play that ^ A make determining what level of ex- V'Cf\ posure has been reached difficult ” The most common form of evaluating exposure is by questionnaire, but Wells said this form of testing often falls flat because of human inaccuracies and false answers. Another way is testing levels of nico tine and other cigarette chemicals in the blood of those exposed. However, this is often difficult because even the longest- lasting chemicals remain for only 40 hours, and diminish in amount over that time. Wells said. The difficulty of determining the lev el of exposure is compounded when re searchers take into account that similar exposures may affect different people in drastically different ways. / “Well, say that a certain person is f exposed to so much smoke and then j develops lung cancer.... The smoke / probably played a part, but there are many other factors that also con tributed to that cancer,” he said. Inal 995 air quality test, the Oc- JH cupational Safety and Health Ad ministration (OSHA) measured the average concentration of airborne nicotine in several environments in which smoking was permitted. i It found two to six micrograms f per cubic meter (ug/m3) of nicotine in office buildings, three to eight ug/m3 in restaurants, one to six ug/m3 in blue-collar workplaces and one to three ug/m3 in homes of smokers. This means, on average, ciga rette smoke was most dense in restaurants, which have more than twice the average concentration of smokers’ homes. “We know that there is defi nitely an increased risk, and stud ies are continuing to more pre cisely define that risk,” Wells said. “But different studies have M n r ' * 1® ^ , i' i LLt : f‘ f different interpretations \M is III and different results.... ^ Some have found a 10 to 30 percent increase in risk to develop cer tain problems associated with smoking while other experiments have found a 70 to 100 percent increase.” The stakes | The American Medical Association (AMA) has found that exposure to second hand smoke may contribute not only to lung cancer, but also to heart disease, lower-res- piratory-track infections, middle-ear infec tions and nasal sinus damage and may in crease the chance of sudden infant death syndrome and chronic asthma. “When many people consider the effects of second-hand smoke, they think of lung cancer, but something that is probably B affect on the car- 1,” said Cynthia diovascular re- Department of logy. said chemicals ; smoke damage sis surrounding and can con- ite to the buildup Df plaque in the vessels, which can lead to a heart attack. “Of course, tage is just like 1 that you would ou had a high-fat • a lack of exer- she said, e severity of ^e depends upon nount and dura- smoke exposure >n encounters, icre is a lot of ght now about IJ I how long it lakes to JJl gel L;n L to normal af- : k one quits smoking, and there ai\ a • > of opinions on the subject, she syJ ‘Lr I think that most 'heart:] si geoiv :M tell you that there is always •n :e that never goes a vac. ;t!« ;• . .>n . exposed, the more of this damage »s done.” Although customers at a restaurant may breathe second hand smoke for a short amount of time. Wells said, those most af fected are the waiters and waitresses. “It is just like with the (light attendants who are constantly exposed to recycled air,” he said. “These waiters and waitresses are constantly being exposed to air with more smoke in it than the home of the smoker (us ing the information from the OSHA study).” Why smoke? With all the warnings and potential dangers of smoking, one (nonsmoker) may ask why smokers continue to request to sit in sections where they are allowed to light up after a meal. “Smoking is the frost difficult addiction to quit because it is so integrated into the dai ly routine of the smoker... both psychologi cally and biologically," said Antonio Cepe- da-Benito. an associate professor of psychology at A&M. He said smokers usually smoke enough to keep a constant amount of the addictive, drug nicotine in their system. However, the times they smoke are determined by certain triggering actions, such as having a large meal or a cup of coffee. Cepeda-Benito said that if nicotine is not maintained constantly, the smoker will strongly crave the drug. “If certain cues predict smoking, then the body will expect to base the nicotine, and people won t be happ; M they can’t have it, he said di is likely that jif the proposal is passed] peop.c will decide to stay home and order pizza if they can’t smoke when eat inn out.” 1 • ' Jrt' jjk) ifluence lended Engineering Career Fair STUDENT ENGINEERS’ COUNCIL Hosted by SEC and the Department of Cooperative Education (Formerly known as the CEO Career Fair) Today (10 am - 6pm) 2nd Floor MSC Bus rides to MSC from Zachrv and back!! 3M ABB Inc. Acterna Adams Consulting Engineers, Inc. Alcatel Alcoa AMD - Advanced Micro Devices Andersen Consulting Applied Materials Applied Research Laboratories/UT Austin Arthur Andersen LLP Austin Energy Avanade Bibb Associates Inc. Black & Veatch The Boeing Company Bury + Partners Cadence Design Systems CFX, Inc. Chicago Bridge & Iron Company CIA Cirrus Logic Cisco Systems Inc. City of Fort Worth City of San Antonio Public Works Dept. Compaq Computer Corporation Conexant Systems, Inc. Dallas Semiconductor DELL e2i, Inc. List of companies hiring for jobs, interns, and co-ops: Scient Corporation Seagate Eastman Chemical Company El Paso Energy Corporation Electro Scientific Industries, Inc. EMCON/OWT Enron Equiva Services Ericsson Ethicon, Inc. (A Johnson and Johnson Company) EXE Technologies Fisher-Rosemount Systems Fluor Corporation Freese and Nichols, Inc. Frito-Lay Fujitsu Network Communications, Inc. General Cable Grainger Granite Construction Flalff Associates, Inc. Halliburton Company Harris Corporation Hewlett-Packard IBM IMC GLOBAL OPERATIONS, INC. Informatica Corp. Intel Corporation InterVoice-Brite KLA-Tencor Corp. KPMG LLP Kurt Salmon Associates Lockheed Martin Lockwood, Andrews & Newnam, Inc. Lone Star Steel Company LSI Logic Lynntech, Inc. Lyondell / Equistar Marlow Industries, Inc. McLeodUSA Micro Systems Engineering, Inc. Micron Technology, Inc. Microsoft Montgomery Watson Motive Motorola Mustang Engineering NASA Johnson Space Center NATCO GROUP National Instruments NetIO Nokia Mobile Phones Nortel Networks North Star Steel Occidental Petroleum Corp./Oil & Gas Co. Pervasive Software PriceWaterhouseCoopers Raytheon Reptron Electronics, Inc. Saint-Gobain Vetrotex America, Inc. Sanmina SBC Communications Inc. SCHLUMBERGER Siemens Building Technologies SOUTHDOWN " Southwest Research Institute STMicroelectronics TAMU Co-op Education Temple Inland Forest Products Corporation Ten X Technology, Inc. Teradyne, Inc. TestChip Technologies Texas Department of Transportation Texas Instruments Incorporated The Software Group, Inc. Titan-Lincom Corporation Tivoli Systems Turner Collie & Braden, Inc. TXI Chaparral Steel TXU Tyco Flow Control United Space Alliance * .C United States Navy Ei^ifie^ri^FrcQrams UBG CORPORATION Vignette Corporation VMS, Inc. Williams Zachry Construction Corporation
