Cigarettes contain 1,000 times more radiation in Chernobyl

Smoking 30 cigarettes a day, you will receive thousands of times more radiation than plants that live in the Chernobyl nuclear disaster area.

Constantin Papastefanou from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece measured the radioactive content of radium and polonium in tobacco plants across the country and calculated the average radioactivity a person received when smoking 30 cigarettes a day . He found that natural tobacco plants contained 251 microsieverts of radioactivity a year, compared with 0.199 radioactive cesium-137 microsieverts from the leaves of the disaster area in Russia.

Although the radioactive content from smoking is only 10% of the average human intake from all natural sources, Papastefanou says that risk is increasing."Many scientists believe that cancer deaths among smokers are due to the radioactive content of tobacco leaves, not nicotine or tar , " he said.

Tobacco. (Photo: emi.wazzap.dk)

T. An