Saturday 9 September 2017

Tricky transplants: From changing personalities to designer vaginas

Transplants are fantastical but tricky beasts. In the last week alone it was reported that a 13 year old girl who died from a brain aneurysm and donated her organs helped eight different people - a record number for a single donor. However transplants can be challenging. They can be surgically complex, like in 2011 when nine-year-old Alannah Shevenell had six of her organs replaced in one incredible operation. Alannah had a massive tumour taking over her abdomen, which necessitated the removal of her stomach, liver, spleen, small intestine, pancreas and part of her oesophagus, along with the tumour. All of the removed organs were replaced with transplanted organs and Alannah is now back in school and thriving. 

Transplants can also be emotionally complex. This was the case for a 44 year old Chinese man who received the world’s first penis transplant in 2006. He had been left with a 1cm penis stump following an accident, and in an impressive feat of surgery, surgeons gave him the penis from the cadaver of a 20-something year-old. Two weeks later they had to chop it off. Initially it appeared to have gone well, the blood supply was good and he could urinate through it, but the recipient asked for it to be removed. He couldn’t live with the idea of having a dead man’s penis.

This emotional impact of a transplant is not restricted to genitalia. A study in the Journal of Near-Death Studies interviewed 10 heart transplant recipients and their friends and family, and encountered some strange stories. There was the woman who felt her partner was a better lover since receiving a woman’s heart, and the recipient who reported feeling the impact of the car crash that killed her donor. This is a small sample size, and there is no good evidence or reason to believe a transplanted organ would affect people in this way. However this doesn’t detract from how these people feel, and it demonstrates the psychological fallout transplants can have.

Moving back to solid science, one of the major challenges when it comes to transplantation is rejection. This is when the immune system identifies the transplant as foreign tissue and launches an assault on it, causing damage that can end in the death of the organ, and therefore possibly the recipient. Rejection is more likely when the donor and recipient are a poor tissue match. This matching is largely based on a set of proteins called Human Leukocyte Antigens (HLAs) that are found on the surface of every single cell in our bodies. Our HLAs are like a barcode that identify our cells as our own. A transplanted organ is exceptionally unlikely to be a perfect match, so it’s HLAs are different from our own cells. If they are too different, the immune system successfully plays ‘spot-the-difference’ and targets the transplant for destruction. We can try and mitigate this by using drugs that suppress the immune system, but this immunosuppression puts the recipient at higher risk of developing infections.

Rejection is not a one way street - sometimes transplants attack their new bodies. For instance, bone marrow transplants effectively transplant a chunk of immune system into the new body in the form of white blood cells. These white blood cells attack their new body, in a phenomenon known as Graft Versus Host Disease (GVHD). This can result in symptoms as mild as a rash or as severe as intestinal bleeding and coma. Sometimes a touch of GVHD can actually be a good thing, like in leukaemia after chemotherapy, where the aggressive transplanted T cells can kill off some of the recipient’s remaining cancer cells.

As I said at the outset, transplants are fantastical but tricky. We’ve covered tricky, so I’d like to end on something fantastical: ‘thoes’ and designer vaginas. When someone loses their thumb, it has an understandably massive impact on the range of movements their hand can perform. One option to improve this range is to remove their big toe and put that in the place the thumb used to be, creating something called a ‘thoe’. The loss of the big toe generally has less impact on a person’s quality of life than having a missing thumb, and the thoe has the added benefit of avoiding rejection because it isn’t foreign tissue. 

Another transplant type that avoids the issue of rejection is a designer vagina. In 2014, in the Lancet, doctors reported a first - they had created vaginas grown from the vulval cells of four girls born with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser Syndrome (MRKHS). MRKHS affects up to 1 in 1,500 female births, and leaves sufferers with a completely or partially absent vagina. By growing vulval cells on a synthetic scaffold the doctors were able to grow vaginas tailored to their recipients, and they were a remarkable success.  After an average of 6.75 years, all the girls gave their new vaginas ratings well within the normal range for lubrication, arousal and orgasm. Pretty fantastical.

These stories, along with many more, can be found in my book Immune: HowYour Body Defends and Protects You, published by Bloomsbury Sigma on September 21st 2017

Saturday 18 February 2017

Raising a feminist

Being a new parent is full of trials and tribulations. Some are practical challenges that you never envisaged in your life. Like trying to change a nappy on a vigorously rolling one year old without getting covered in poo. Others are more philosophical, like how do I raise a feminist? For this I turn to Eva and Jude, two children who were on a programme called the Secret Life Of Five-Year-Olds (if you haven’t seen it, find it on Channel 4, it’s immense). Why can’t girls be scientists? Jude, a 5-year-old boy, replies that they’d ‘make silly potions’. His companion, a 5-year-old girl named Eva, promptly volunteers ‘I extracted the DNA from a banana once’. Boom. Drops mic. 

I’m not alone in thinking Eva is a feminist icon. I want to write to Eva’s mum and ask for a guide to raising a little girl who schools boys on karate and is aware of the suffragette movement. I suspect step one is to be a well informed feminist yourself. I asked my husband to name some famous females in science or medicine and he could name more than I could. Ugh. I have therefore been schooling myself on some of the less well celebrated, but seriously fierce, females that have blazed a trail in science or medicine. Let me share:

Image: American Red Cross
Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross in 1881 at the age of 60, and headed it for 23 years. This formidable lady also provided aid to soldiers during the American Civil War, venturing into the heart of the battlefield, where medical units feared to tread. In addition to nursing, caring and cooking for soldiers, one of her most significant contributions came towards the end of the war when families sought information about missing loved ones. Then President Lincoln wrote: “To the Friends of Missing Persons: Miss Clara Barton has kindly offered to search for the missing prisoners of war. Please address her . . . giving her the name, regiment, and company of any missing prisoner.” Over four years she and her team responded to over 63,000 letters and identified over 22,000 missing men. Today the Red Cross still provide this searching service and describe it as one of their most valued activities.


Image: Nobel
Irene Joliot-Curie had rather big scientific shoes to fill, with her parents Marie and Pierre Curie having both earned Nobel Prizes. Yet fill them she did - sharing the 1935 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with her husband Frederic Joliot. Irene worked with her mum to provide mobile X-ray units during World War I, returning to her studies in Paris before going on to work at the Institut de Radium which had been founded by her parents. It was here that she and her husband bombarded a piece of aluminium with alpha particles, artificially creating a radioactive substance for the very first time and earning them a Nobel Prize.


Rebecca Lee Crumpler made history in 1864 when she became the first African American woman to be awarded a medical degree. Little is known about her life, and despite her massive achievement no images of her exist today. What we do know of her comes from her 'Book of Medical Discourses', whose existence is further testimony to her intelligence and fortitude as it was one of the first medical publications by an African American. Reflecting on why she had entered into medicine she said: "It may be well to state here that, having been reared by a kind aunt in Pennsylvania, whose usefulness with the sick was continually sought, I early conceived a liking for, and sought every opportunity to relieve the sufferings of others.” Her desire to alleviate suffering was such that she treated children without concern for their parents ability to pay her.


If you’re interested in more impressive women, there’s a helpful (though woefully short) list of female Nobel Laureates available here. The NIH also has an interesting project called Changing the Face of Medicine which celebrates female physicians. 

In the week of Galentine’s Day, I’d like to say a big thank you to these women and to all the strong women I’m lucky to have in my life. I look forward to raising my little feminist with my staunchly feminist hubbie, and maybe toots will follow in the footsteps of these illustrious women. Or maybe she’ll carve her own unique path. Whatever road she chooses I hope she’ll know that well-behaved women rarely make history.

Tuesday 22 July 2014

Norovirus is a social butterfly

Every writer needs a muse. Today, mine is diarrhoea. Inspired by the recent norovirus outbreak at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games I thought I’d write a few words on this intestinal disruptor. There will be images, and they will be beautiful. I promise.

Norovirus is a social butterfly. It spreads readily from person to person, casually disregarding social etiquette and even Michelin stars. In the spring of 2009 it descended upon Heston Blumenthal’s £200 a head restaurant The Fat Duck. It was the largest ever norovirus outbreak at a UK restaurant, with at least 240 people gushing out their haute cuisine. In the aftermath it became apparent that the most likely source was a batch of contaminated oysters.


 "Fresh Oysters" Credit Urville86 
  Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
A fact not to be shared over a romantic dinner is that this alleged aphrodisiac often harbours norovirus. A 2011 study by the Food Standards Agency found that 76% of British oysters tested were contaminated. Like us, oysters unwittingly consume the virus from human sewage. As filter feeders they churn huge volumes of water through their bodies to extract food and during this process they can accumulate any viruses and bacteria contaminating the water. There are industrial techniques that aim to purge these contaminants from oysters by leaving them in clean, UV irradiated water for a few days before harvesting. However it’s unclear how effective this approach is for norovirus. On the plus side, even eating norovirus contaminated oysters won’t necessarily result in harm- that depends on the health of the person eating them and the concentration of viral particles. Nevertheless, you’d be forgiven if this undermines your faith in Cosmopolitan’s assertion that swallowing this raw grey bivalve mollusc “really can spark randiness”.

Colour-enhanced electron micrograph of Norovirus.
                   Credit David Gregory&Debbie Marshall, Wellcome Images Creative Commons by-nc-nd 4.0
The conduit for the recent Glasgow Commonwealth Games norovirus outbreak was less glamorous: a temporary toilet. So far there have been 53 suspected cases amongst the staff, who are a bathroom-hovering microcosm of a global problem- every year norovirus causes 267 million infections worldwide. Inside the guts of the Glasgow staff norovirus will have set to work with its toolkit, entering cells and hijacking their machinery to make new norovirus particles. What makes this heist particularly impressive is that the virus has just nine protein-coding genes in its repertoire. For contrast fruit flies have 13,000. By leveraging the cells’ own resources the norovirus is able to set up an epic production line that creates billions of new viral particles. Then with an efficiency that would make even Amazon envious, norovirus sets about dispatching from its human factory to the outside world. Which is where things get unpleasant. We don’t know how, but the virus hijacks the nervous system and sends signals to the stomach to make it contract violently and vomit. This generates tiny droplets, which float through the air, dispersing the virus onto surrounding surfaces. The next unsuspecting host has to transfer just 18 viral particles to their mouth to become ill.

Not content with one exit strategy, norovirus also causes diarrhoea. It achieves this by increasing the amount of fluid escaping through the lining of the intestine. In a healthy gut, the cells that line the intestine are held together by protein linking-structures called tight junctions. These are demonstrated as continuous blue lines in the left-hand image below. Norovirus disrupts these tight junctions, which makes the gut leaky and causes watery poo. E. coli takes a similar approach, and in the right-hand image we can see how the red dots (E. coli) have proliferated and the tight junctions have been broken-down. The remnants of the tight junctions exists as discontinuous blue dots, which are no longer capable of stopping water leaking between the cells and out into the intestine.


How E. coli causes diarrhoea.
Credit S. Schuller, Wellcome Images Creative Commons by-nc-nd 4.0

In its quest for a steady stream of diarrhoea, norovirus also increases the number of chloride ions pumped by cells into the intestine. Water follows the lead of the ions in a process called osmosis. This potent combination of leaky tight junctions and increased osmosis enables norovirus to generate diarrhoea.

It’s been estimated that a single gram of poo from an infected person contains 100 billion viral particles. That means there are ten times more norovirus particles in a gram of infected poo, than there are people on the planet. Which perhaps allows Glasgow and Heston to take comfort from the fact that they were beaten by a virus that’s disgustingly good at spreading itself.

Monday 5 August 2013

How to die without dying

Have you ever watched someone die? Almost everybody has. Ok, so not in real life but on TV or in a film? Deaths are used by writers to make us laugh or cry, but I've watched two this week which, well, irritated me. Instead of being sucked into the emotional tragedy unfolding before me, I sat muttering ”well that wasn't very realistic”. Now, I am the queen of suspending disbelief- I've watched Neighbours for over 25 years, my Freeview recorder has 169 episodes of Murder, She Wrote on it (Angela Lansbury makes me want to be old) and I believe that Jack Bauer really could do all that AND MORE in 24hrs. But even my imagination couldn’t keep me in TV land when faced with Queen Eva's death in Once Upon a Time this week. I was sucked out of the story and spat out onto the sofa by the absurdity of it. An immaculately beautiful woman imparted an eloquent, heartfelt message before dying in a neat, quick and quiet way. You could almost feel her holding her breath. No death rattle for Queen Eva.

But that was a fairy-tale, she was poisoned, maybe magically cursed people do die just like that. (The Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine was no help in this matter). But Queen Eva wasn't the only irksome death of the week- I felt just as bothered by the departure of Raj from 90210. Yes, my name is Catherine and I watch 90210…it’s like the crack of TV, so bad, yet you just can’t stop it, and your husband doesn't understand why you keep going back to it. Anyways, there I was, enjoying my fix of emotional highs and lows delivered by the beautiful people. Raj was in hospital looking a little hungover. We know he’s close to death, purely because we've been told so, but he's chatting away, being witty, romantic and thoughtful. Then his girl pops out for a second and returns to find him dead. We know he's dead because his eyes are shut and she drops a glass of water. Again it’s neat, quick and quiet. Bothersomely so.

You see people in TV land, like Raj and Eva, die without dying. In the real world, death is an event, but dying is a process. Noisy, irregular breathing, semi-consciousness, confusion, a dry mouth, restlessness- these are often very normal parts of dying.

Yet we don’t often see this on TV, despite the fact that a LOT of people die in soaps. A study of soap characters in the BMJ found that “standardised mortality ratios for characters were among the highest for any occupation yet described”. The authors noted that “Their lives are more dangerous even than those of Formula One racing drivers or bomb disposal experts”. But despite this obsession with death, TV hates people dying. Perhaps because it’s too upsetting? Yet, think of a soap wedding- we expect it to be upsetting, we KNOW there are very few happily ever afters in soap land. TV expends a huge amount of effort in creating drama and wringing every ounce of emotion from an audience. So it seems strange that dying a soap death is as simple and sanitized as you could hope for. Does this suggest dying, more than death, is a taboo too shocking for TV?

I know that reality isn't what these programmes are made for, but they are based firmly in our world. Music we know plays in the pub, there are frequent references to Facebook and everyone in Ramsay Street has an ill-disguised mac book. These shows tell stories about people and they're watched by millions. That means they have incredible potential to influence our expectations of what normal is. Is TV making us think it’s normal to die without dying? If so, a lot of us are ill prepared for when death forces its way from our screens and into our lives.

Think back to the last time you watched someone die in TV or film land. Did you really watch them die, or just see a death?

Monday 6 May 2013

Poo, glorious poo

C. diff. Courtesy of Marcus007 at de.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons
 When is it medically advisable to eat some one else's poo? When you need a poo transplant.
Poo transplants could be the solution to one of the biggest problems facing the NHS today- the bacterial infection Clostridium difficile. C.diff, as its known to its friends, infects about 18,000 people in England and Wales every year and is involved in the deaths of about 2000 people.
C.diff typically arises due to imbalances in your normal gut bacteria. You see your gut is like a city, a city with about 100 trillion bacterial residents happily munching away on a banquet of bowel contents. The average person has about 1000 different types of bacteria in their gut, and about 3% of healthy adults have C.diff in that mix. The C.diff doesn't cause them any problems because its numbers are kept in check by the other gut bacteria. However treatment with broad spectrum antibiotics can disrupt this happy community, killing off vast swathes of bacteria but crucially not the C.diff which is particularly hardy. Given free rein the C.diff multiplies rapidly and produce toxins which damage the gut. In some people this causes mild diarrhoea and abdominal pain, in others it can lead to torrential diarrhoea, perforation of the colon and death.
Traditional treatment involves stopping the broad spectrum antibiotics and prescribing antibiotics which specifically target the C.diff. However C. diff is becoming resistant to these antibiotics and about 22% of patients who are treated then relapse. This can result in a cycle of illness and hospital admission which is costly to the patient and the hospital.

So it's time to start thinking outside of the box. Cue the poo transplant. The thinking goes like this- if the cause of the problem is disruption to the normal community of gut bacteria, why not just pop those bacteria back in to crowd out the C.diff? Simples. Practically, the first step is to identify a donor, usually a close relative of the patient, and screen them for a range of infectious diseases and parasites. You should also make sure they haven't recently consumed anything the intended recipient is allergic to, before asking them to make their "donation". You then pop it in a household blender, adding salt water or milk to achieve a slurry consistency and blitz it down. Next you need to strain your concoction to remove large materials- one medic in the UK uses coffee filters. Top tip. Then you're ready to administer it- about 25ml from above (via a tube into the stomach), or 250ml from below.
Now, its important to note that poo transplants are experimental. To date only small case studies have been carried out, but with 200 total reported cases, an average cure rate of 96% and no serious adverse events reported to date, it's worth carrying out a large trial to assess it thoroughly.
So, poo transplants-the ideal treatment for a cash strapped NHS. Its cheap, plentiful and it seems to work. We just have to convince people to consume someone else's poo....or, let us pop it in their bums. Bottoms up!

Sunday 3 March 2013

A Medical Mystery for Mother's Day...

I'd like to tell you a curious story. Jane was a 52 year old woman in need of a kidney transplant. Thankfully she had 3 loving sons who were all very happy to give her one of theirs. So Jane's doctors performed tests to find out which of the three boys would be the best match, but the results were surprising. In the words of Jeremy Kyle, the DNA test showed that Jane was not the mother of two of the boys... Hang on, said Jane, childbirth is not something you easily forget. They're definitely mine. And she was right. It turns out Jane was a chimera.

Chimerism is the existence of two genetically different cell lines in one organism. This can arise for a number of reasons- it can be caused by medics, like when someone has an organ transplant, or be naturally occurring. In Jane's case, it began in her mum's womb, with two eggs that had been fertilised by different sperm creating two embryos. Ordinarily, they would develop into two non-identical twins. However in Jane's case the two balls of cells fused early in development creating one person with both cell lines.


Thus when doctors did the first tissue typing tests on Jane, just by chance they had only sampled the 'yellow' cell line which was responsible for one of her sons. When they went back again they found the 'pink' cell line which had given rise to the other two boys.

This particular type of human chimerism is thought to be pretty rare- there are only 30 case reports in the literature. (Though remarkably both House and CSI's Gil Grissom have encountered cases.) What happens far more frequently is fetal microchimerism- which occurs in pregnant women when cells cross the placenta from baby to mum. This is awesome because we used to think the placenta was this barrier which prevented any cells crossing over. Now we've found both cells and free floating DNA cross the placenta, and that the cells can hang around for decades after the baby was born. Why? As is often the case in medicine we're not sure but one theory is that the fetal cells might have healing properties for mum. In pregnant mice who've had a heart attack, fetal cells can travel to the mum's heart where they develop into new heart muscle to repair the damage.

Whilst we're still in the early stages of understanding why this happens, we already have a practical application. In the United States today, a pregnant woman can have a blood test which isn't looking for abnormalities in her DNA, but in that of her fetus. The DNA test isn't conclusive enough to be used to diagnose genetic conditions in isolation, but it is a good screening test for certain conditions including Down's syndrome.


Now, we started with a curious tale, so let's close with a curious fact and one that's appropriate for Mother's Day: This exchange of cells across the placenta is a two way process. So you may well have some of your mum's cells rushing through your veins right now. In my case they're probably the ones that tell me to put on sensible shoes and put that boy down...


This post is based on a presentation I gave at the 2013 FameLab regional finals.

Sunday 2 December 2012

This is my truth, now tell me yours

Image: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos

My truth is a tale of smoke and cynicism, power and death, and a glimmer of fiery, fragile hope.

I tripped up the stairs, clutching a clipboard and breathlessly reciting the signs of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)- tar staining, cyanosis, hyperinflated chest, wheeze. Suddenly my train of thought was derailed. There was a cigarette butt wilfully loitering on the steps. Even here. I felt a stinging slap of hopelessness- my little nicotine nemesis was so beloved that it was able to sit bold as brass on the steps to our respiratory ward. I gave it a vicious look, trudged onwards and started a new list. Bed 4, end stage COPD- clutching a Venturi mask to her face, every inch of her body exhausted by the effort of gas exchange, breathing as hard as a marathon runner, knowing it wouldn't stop until she died. Bed 7, query lung cancer- his awake bronchoalveolar lavage the single most horrific procedure I'd ever seen. A sort of iatrogenic water boarding that had failed to provide any information on the large mass dominating his chest X-ray. My list, and most of the people on our ward, were testimony to the power and horror of tobacco.

The tendrils of tobacco's power reached beyond the respiratory ward. I could take a history anywhere in any hospital and when someone described themselves as a smoker, my heart would sink a little at their increased risk of heart disease, hypertension, stroke and cancer. As a medical student my inner optimist would enquire about smoking cessation, but the barrage of polite declines slowly eroded this optimism and by the time I was qualified the question was almost a formality.

Sadly, my blossoming cynicism followed me out of the hospital and all the way home. One of my friends was a smoker and philosopher who somersaulted his way through arguments. We debated life, the universe and smoking. As a scientist I would hurl statistics at him- 100,000 people die every year in the UK from smoking related illnesses. 8 in 10 non-smokers live beyond age 70, but only half of long term smokers do (1). I'd outline the dangers of second hand smoke and give graphic descriptions of how people suffocate over weeks and months thanks to emphysema. Nothing phased him. He knew the risks, it was his choice. He felt my desire to dissuade him bordered on the unethical because it insulted his autonomy. The reality was I had no real ability to change it. And perhaps I was being a dictator to even try. Certainly my friend wasn't alone, British society accepted smoking, what right did I have to disagree? People have free will, let them exercise it.

Then two events shifted my perspective: the death of a loved one and a political triumph.

Coffins are small. They house a body, but they can never hold a person. My cousin baked the most amazing biscuits I'll ever eat, she loved music and had unending patience for jigsaws. She was kind and generous and irreplaceable. These things, the things that made her who she was, live in my heart and in every person who was lucky enough to know her. She died in her forties from lung cancer.

34,859 families stood over coffins because of lung cancer in 2010 (2). Being one of those families has completely dissolved any qualms I had about impinging on people's ability to smoke. My philosopher friend may want his autonomy, but on balance I think the world would be a better place with fewer cigarettes and fewer coffins. Sod your right to inhale tar and cyanide and die gasping.

I realise my opinions may offend, so let us turn to a safer subject: politics. I come from Scotland, a wild country that is famed for its whisky and which offers a plethora of pubs to drink it in. I never hoped we would be able to ban smoking in these pubs, yet in March 2006 Scotland did exactly that with a ban on smoking in enclosed public places (3). In 2007 Wales, Northern Ireland and England followed. The positive impact on health has been notable- air quality in pubs has improved, bar workers have better respiratory health and hospital admissions for acute coronary syndrome are down (4). Whilst I expected improvements in health, I didn't expect it to be popular. A recent survey of 12,000 British adults found that 78% supported the ban (5) .This societal support and the political will to ban smoking, stirred my comatose optimist and gave me a glimmer of hope.

This year, my optimist was brought back fighting by the Australian government. 2012 was the year that Australia passed a plain packaging law to standardise cigarette packets (6). Goodbye camels and cowboys, hello disease addled eyes and cancer ridden lungs on a murky green background. Lest we forget who is responsible for selling these deadly wares, companies can put their name on the packet in a dull, diminutive font. It has been said this will have no impact on smoking, but the tobacco companies' reactions tell a different story. British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco, Philip Morris and Japan Tobacco all took legal action against the Australian government, claiming the law violated the companies' intellectual property rights. Philip Morris also asserted the law would contravene a bilateral trade agreement with Hong Kong that would leave the government liable to pay Philip Morris huge amounts in compensation (7). Thankfully the Australian High Court ruled that the laws were sound and they will come into force in December 2012. The perfect Christmas present for Australian hearts and lungs.

With the return of my fiery, fragile hope, I've come to find my truth. Trying to stop people smoking wasn't thinking too big, it wasn't thinking big enough. We can't take on tobacco one smoker at a time, it's like trying to stop malaria by catching every mosquito in the world with a pair of chopsticks. We need to be murderously ambitious. We need to suffocate the tobacco industry. The World Health Organisation (WHO) have defined the elimination of leprosy as a prevalence of less than 1 case per 10,000 of the population (8). Using this definition, I believe it's realistic to eliminate tobacco smoking in the UK in my lifetime. Given longer I think we can eliminate it worldwide.

You may say I'm a dreamer, but if you look at the statistics of smoking we really have no choice but to make it happen. In the Lancet earlier this year, Giovino et al reported the results of the Global Adult Tobacco Survey of 14 low and middle income countries. 40.7% of men in the survey smoked a tobacco product, ranging from 21.6% in Brazil to 60.2% in Russia (9). These high demand rates are readily met by the tobacco industry with cigarettes being manufactured faster and cheaper than ever before. One of the most formidable accounts of this mass production of death was penned by Proctor this year (10). He uses the assumption that one death is caused by every million cigarettes smoked, to provide some sickening statistics.

“…the 6 trillion smoked in 1990 will cause about 6 million deaths in 2015. That's one death every 5seconds.

Cigarette companies make about a penny in profit for every cigarette sold...a tobacco manufacturer will make about US$10000 for every death caused by their products.

We can even make our own relatable statistics. Philip Morris' Richmond plant in Virginia, USA made 146 billion cigarettes in 2010. That's 146,000 deaths. The Kunming Cigarette Factory in China made just 71 billion that year, a paltry 71,000 deaths (10). Between these two factories, in a single year's production they will kill the equivalent of every man woman and child in the town I was born in. 54 times over. Don't feel left out, its a game we can all play.

Hopefully you're now asking yourselfhow do we end it? Some suggestions are well known, such as plain packaging, high taxes, restricted advertising and accessible cessation. But ours is an ambitious aim, which will require daring and innovation. Borland (11) has proposed a regulated market model, which would take mass marketing away from the tobacco companies and hand it to an agency with a harm reduction charter. Advantages of this approach would include brand control, price control and the ability to incentivise manufacturers reducing the harmfulness of the products. An equally bold idea is Daynard's suggestion that reducing nicotine levels in cigarettes to non-addictive levels could secure a smoke free future (12). While I think both of these ideas are compelling, I also find a certain radical appeal to Tasmania's2000 Smoke Free Generationidea, which would ban the sale of cigarettes to anyone born after the year 2000 (13).

All of these ideas are big and brave and massively problematic, much like taking on the tobacco industry. Together, the biggest tobacco firms make more than $1,100 of profit a second (14), so they have much to lose if smoking declines. This fact was felt by the Australian health department when they were passing the plain packaging bill through parliament. The team wereswampedby 63 freedom of information requests, 52 of which were courtesy of tobacco companies in what has been described by commentators asa specific and deliberate attempt to divert resources(15). Disappointingly, tobacco companies are being aided in their efforts to maintain power and profit by the policies of some countries. The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control came into force in 2005 and was a landmark achievement in international public health. It sets minimum standards for tobacco control which are legally binding in 176 countries, covering every aspect of the industry from production to marketing and taxation. Yet, even under a Democratic President with a vocal commitment to healthcare the United States has not ratified the convention (16). Clearly there is a long way to go before my hopes are realised.

The tobacco industry has the audacity to make millions of dollars selling an addictive product which causes millions of deaths. We must be as smart, as ambitious, as bold as they are. If ever there was a man who captured all of these qualities it was Apple's visionary leader Steve Jobs. In 2005 at Stanford University he delivered the most moving and inspiring piece of public speaking I've ever heard. His advice was to “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” This is the mantra public health needs- from smoking to obesity, from malaria to HIV, it is imperative we think big. When devising solutions we shouldn't just accept our limitations, instead we must push them, shove them, shatter them. Stay hungry. Stay foolish. That's my truth, now tell me yours.
  1. Smoking- The Facts. http://www.patient.co.uk/health/Smoking-The-Facts.htm Accessed 06/10/12