For three decades, Dr. David M. Burns has written and edited some of the seminal work on tobacco science and the hazards of modern cigarettes: surgeon general’s reports, National Cancer Institute monographs, World Health Organization studies.
And he is hardly a dispassionate scientist. As a pulmonologist who has cared for hundreds of smokers who died of lung cancer, he is an unabashed campaigner against smoking.
That is why, with the Senate just weeks away from a vote on landmark legislation to regulate tobacco, Dr. Burns, 61, is now willing to sidestep the protocols of peer-reviewed science. He wants to sound one more alarm about the dangers of smoking.
Dr. Burns says he has new information, based on two years of study, indicating that cigarettes — even the supposedly safer ones — pose a much higher risk of lung cancer than before the surgeon general first declared them a health hazard in 1964.
He said the risk of a smoker’s developing lung cancer may be twice as high as it was then, even though tar and nicotine have been reduced.
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