Cynical Activities - S
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SLUDGE
Sewage sludge that has been converted to fertilizer (and what else can you do with sewage sludge?) can transmit E. coli, salmonella, hepatitis B, and other bacteria and viruses. |
SMOG
No surprises here: smog is a health problem, no matter how hard the auto companies try to say it isn't (from the Official Auto Company Dictionary: "smog, n. What smog?"). Smog results in fifty-three thousand hospitalizations, sends 159,000 people to emergency rooms, and triggers 6.2 million asthma attacks each summer in the eastern half of the United States. |
SMOG, REDUCING
Don't think cutting down on smog is the answer, though. Smog absorbs the sun's heat and masks the effects of global warming. When clean air laws reduce the amount of smog in the air, global warming becomes more evident. |
SMOKERS
It makes a lot of sense to keep the smokers in the car park (or on some other continent, a strategy the tobacco companies are now working on). A woman exposed to others' cigarette smoke may have difficulty becoming pregnant. If you do get pregnant and are exposed to smoke, you're more likely to give birth to a baby that is underweight and suffers from loss of lung function at least through its teens. Infants in smokers' households are more likely to die, and children will be at risk from respiratory diseases and ear infections. Adult women exposed to smokers double their risk of heart attacks, and environmental tobacco smoke has been associated with adult-onset asthma. Still, how much difference would it make to the quality of your air if we got rid of all the smokers and kept the cars? |
SMOKING
Guess what? The Surgeon General is right: smoking's not good for you. Smoking impairs the health of your muscles, bones, and joints, increases your risk of being injured when you exercise (the usual smoker's solution: so don't exercise), causes loss of bone mass, significantly slows the healing of fractures, and makes it more likely that you'll lose your teeth. It also causes 60 percent of fatal cancers that affect smokers, notably cancers of the lungs (lung cancer death rates among American women went up by 600 percent between 1950 and 2000), mouth, throat, esophagus, bladder, breast, skin, pancreas, and anus; it leads to heart disease (30 percent of all U.S. deaths from heart disease are a result of smoking), emphysema, and perforated peptic ulcers, causes ruptured aneurisms, rheumatoid arthritis, hearing impairment, and impotence, increases women's risk of undergoing delays in conceiving, becoming infertile, or developing multiple sclerosis, and quadruples the likelihood of life-threatening blood infections or meningitis from Streptococcus pneumonias. If you smoke while pregnant, you're much more likely to have children who have behavior problems and are at risk of drug addiction later in life. Smoking is strongly associated with mental illness in the population as a whole, and with depression and anxiety disorders in teenagers. Adolescents who fight, drive while drunk, and generally take risks are more likely to be smokers. People who smoke are less likely to benefit from balloon angioplasty and other procedures to open obstructed heart arteries. Smoking results in 430,000 deaths a year in the U.S.; by 2020 it may cause more deaths in most developing countries than AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, automobile crashes, homicides, and suicides combined; and by 2030 it is expected to be the single biggest cause of death worldwide. Smoking is also a leading cause of fires and death from fires. It also greatly increases your risk of getting long lectures from complete strangers about how you're polluting the air. (The only way to get rid of these helpful people is to ask them if they drive cars. They always do.) |
SMOKING, CUTTING BACK ON
If you're cutting down on cigarettes, don't bother. People absorb just as many toxins from their cigarettes when they cut their smoking in half, since they smoke their remaining cigarettes twice as hard. On the other hand, they only get half as many lectures about air pollution from those helpful strangers in their SUVs. |
SMOKING, NOT
Non-smokers have higher rates of Parkinson's disease than people who smoke. Before you light up in panic, however, take another look at "Smoking." |
SMOKING, QUITTING
People who quit smoking have a heightened risk of major depression. Quitting smoking also imposes serious fiscal strains on governments, whose costs for health care and pensions increase as people live longer. If you're an anarchist, quit now. |
SMOKING WHILE SUNBATHING
It's official: smoking definitely does not make you look cool. In fact, it breaks down the connective tissue that maintains the skin's elasticity, which can combine with exposure to sunlight to make you look much older. Being too concerned about this is ageism, of course, but you still might want to keep it in mind. |
SNORING
Very loud snoring interrupted by intermittent pauses in breathing may be a sign of obstructive sleep apnea. This can make normal sleep impossible, lead to severe daytime fatigue and irritability, cause headaches, reduce interest in sex, increase the risk of auto accidents by three to five times, and result in heart disease and strokes—and that's just in the snorer, not in the lucky person sharing his or her bed. |
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