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Tobacco and health
Published in Sally Robinson, Priorities for Health Promotion and Public Health, 2021
ASH (2018a) describe smoking as a process whereby the smoke carries the toxic chemicals into the smoker or into the air in the form of particulates, solids and gases. Particulates include tar and nicotine. Tar is the sticky brown substance that stains smokers’ teeth and fingers. Tar is one of the chemicals that causes cancer. Nicotine is highly addictive and it is the craving for nicotine that often keeps people smoking. Lower-tar cigarettes are also lower in nicotine, but they are not safer or healthier because many smokers smoke more, or inhale more deeply, to get more nicotine, thus maintaining their overall tar inhalation.
How Nanoparticles Are Generated
Published in Antonietta Morena Gatti, Stefano Montanari, Advances in Nanopathology From Vaccines to Food, 2021
Antonietta Morena Gatti, Stefano Montanari
Burning implies the oxidation, in fact the addition of atmospheric oxygen, of the substances which can be oxidised, and, for technical reasons, considering all the technology needed, combustion in an incinerator requires not only oxygen but also water, methane, activated carbon, carbonates, ammonia, etc. All this means adding to waste more or less as much mass, a mass which is then inevitably discharged as such or transformed into different pollutants into the environment. But, as already mentioned and leaving aside the thousands of organic pollutants (among which dioxins, furans, polychlorobiphenyls, a huge variety of polycyclic organic compounds, etc.), combustion means producing primary and secondary particles which, also as ash (approximately 1/3 of the initial waste mass is transformed into ash), enter the environment and accumulate. When treated legally, ash is disposed of in landfills and, being particularly toxic, makes this means of miscellaneous waste storage definitely dangerous. In some circumstances, we worked in landfills obtained from disused quarries, with the ashes which, together with a set of other toxic substances, carried by rainwater ended up in the aquifers. Mixed with asphalt, as it happens in some circumstances, that toxic ash constitutes a further risk to health, as asphalt gets rapidly worn, thus liberating those particles into the atmosphere. All in all, a similar risk is that of ashes mixed with cement, with the aggravating circumstance of obtaining a poor-quality product. More will be said in a few pages.
Our Radiation Environment
Published in T. D. Luckey, Radiation Hormesis, 2020
Since coal is concentrated plant residue, such information is applicable to wood burning stoves and fireplaces. The concentrations of each element would be lower, but the amount required for an equivalent amount of heat is correspondingly greater. Wood is composed of about 2% ash. Therefore, wood smoke should have about ten times greater concentration of radionuclides than wood; it has >5 mBq/kg. A small amount of escaping smoke from domestic wood fires reach lungs without benefit of mechanical filtration.
Time trends in hospitalizations with anxiolytic, sedative, or hypnotic drug use disorder: a 17-year U.S. national study
Published in Journal of Addictive Diseases, 2022
While many studies of ASH use exist, our study described the epidemiology of hospitalizations with ASH use disorder. In a U.S. national study of ambulatory visits, ASH use associated primary care visits increased from 2003–2005 to 2010–2012 (2), similar to an increased national burden of ASH use in Australia from 2002 to 2007 (5). Our study extends these findings to ASH use disorder hospitalizations in a representative national U.S. sample. A three-fold increase in the rate of hospitalizations with ASH use disorder, and a three-fold increase in non-home discharge, and in-hospital mortality rate from 1998 to 2014 are important study findings that merit further discussion. This study examined hospitalizations with ASH use disorder over a 17-year period in the U.S., and provided the evidence of an increasing healthcare burden of ASH use disorder in the U.S. The opioid epidemic in the United States19 has brought attention to the societal and national impact of ASH use disorder and similar drug use disorders.
Levels of PCDDs/PCDFs in waste incineration ash of some Jordanian hospitals using GC/MS
Published in Toxin Reviews, 2021
Sharif Arar, Mahmoud A. Alawi, Nisreen E. Al-Mikhi
Waste incineration is one of the main waste disposal strategies used in treating hospital waste in many countries. However, emission of combustion by-products like dioxins, furans, and heavy metals in fly- and bottom ash is inevitable and poses a serious environmental and public health concerns, where these accumulative pollutants can be transported and leached from landfills and dumping sites (Petrilik and Ryder 2005). The environmental impact of medical waste incinerators has become the subject of public concern. The main theme of incinerators is to develop a sustainable waste management by reducing volume and weight of non-avoidable and non-recyclable medical waste to be disposed, and to decrease its post depositional reactivity due to its inorganic and organic matter constituents (Mininni et al.2007). In this process, unintentional release of the toxic polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDDs) and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs occurs, which have hormone-disrupting and carcinogenic properties (Van den Berg et al.2006). These PCDDs/PCDFs are deposited in the incinerator bottom ash which is a form of ash produced in incineration facilities. This material is discharged from the moving grate of municipal solid waste incinerators or fly ash at the top end of stack of the incinerators that was removed by special types of filters.
Cytotoxicity and antigenotoxicity evaluation of acetylshikonin and shikonin
Published in Drug and Chemical Toxicology, 2021
Ramona Figat, Anna Zgadzaj, Sylwia Geschke, Patrycja Sieczka, Agnieszka Pietrosiuk, Sylwester Sommer, Agata Skrzypczak
After performing the cytotoxicity assays, we selected two non-cytotoxic concentrations of each of the naphthoquinones tested for micronucleus assay: 0.05 and 0.1 mg/L for SH, 0.1 mg/L and 0.3 mg/L for ASH. In the test performed without metabolic activation ASH in concentration 0.3 mg/L increased the frequency of MN. In the test with metabolic activation no effect was observed. Based on the results obtained it can be concluded, that ASH have a slight genotoxic potential in the highest tested concentration. In our previous study, we investigated genotoxicity of SH and ASH in umu-test with S. typhimurium TA1535 cells and no effect was observed (Skrzypczak et al.2015). The genotoxicity of acetylshikonin may be connected with the naphthoquinones ability to generate reactive oxygen species (Jeung et al.2016) or the ability to alkylate (Wang et al. 2014).