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Smokers

Smokers pose huge burden on employers with extra sick days and lower productivity

Wednesday, May 02, 2007
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...)
Tags: smokers, health news, Natural News


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Separate studies on two continents have concluded smoking is associated with decreased productivity on the job, both in the civilian and military sectors. The studies were published in the April 2007 issue of the journal Tobacco Control.

"In both the civilian and military sectors, smoking has been linked to disability and job-related outcomes, including decreased productivity, increased absenteeism, and long and more frequent work breaks," reported Terry L. Conway, Ph.D. and colleagues at San Diego State University Graduate School of Public Health.

The study of civilians was conducted by Dr. Petter Lundborg, an economist at the Free University of Amsterdam. Lundborg examined data on a nationally representative sample of 14,272 workers, ages 16 to 65, in Sweden. Lundborg analyzed sick days taken between 1988 to 1991 using information from a social insurance database.

He found smokers averaged 34 sick days annually, compared to 25 sick days a year for former smokers and 20 for nonsmokers. In his analysis, Lundborg controlled for health problems among all participants and found health problems were not the only cause of smokers' absenteeism. "I found that health problems accounted for about two days and something," said Lundborg. "The remaining eight days are probably explained by something other than health. There are a number of possible explanations for the difference," he said, "There might be personal characteristics that we can't observe."
Likewise, Conway and fellow researchers in a study of women in the U.S. Navy noted "Cigarette smoking might simply be a 'marker' for other underlying factors (e.g., non-conformity, high risk-taking) that contribute to poorer performance in the military."

Conway and colleagues examined data on 5,487 women who enlisted during a one-year period beginning in March 1996. "Compared with never-smokers, daily smokers at entry into the U.S. Navy had subsequent career outcomes consistently indicating poorer job performance (e.g., early attrition prior to serving a full-term enlistment, more likely to have a less-than-honorable discharge, more demotions and desertions, lower achieved pay-grade and less likely to re-enlist)," they wrote.

"Tobacco use is of particular concern to the U.S. Department of Defense because, historically, the military has had higher and heavier rates of tobacco use than civilians," wrote the researchers. The Pentagon health survey found, among members of the U.S. military, smoking increased from 30% in 1988 to 34% in 2002 -- the first recorded rise since 1980.

Among the U.S. population in general, smoking has steadily decreased since 1965. In 1965, 42.4% of American adults were smokers, compared to 20.9% in 2004. This decline began after the Surgeon General's first report on the dangers of smoking in 1964. This warning could have been made earlier -- in 1957 and again in 1959 then-Surgeon General Leroy Burney was the first federal officer to publicly state smoking was a cause of lung cancer.

As discussed in various NewsTarget stories, when the Surgeon General's report finally surfaced in 1964, the American Medical Association did not endorse the report. Just a month prior, the AMA had accepted $15 million in funding from the tobacco industry. The Journal of the American Medical Association accepted money from tobacco companies for many years while it ran their full-page advertisements in the journal.

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About the author:Mike Adams (aka the "Health Ranger") is a best selling author (#1 best selling science book on Amazon.com) and a globally recognized scientific researcher in clean foods. He serves as the founding editor of NaturalNews.com and the lab science director of an internationally accredited (ISO 17025) analytical laboratory known as CWC Labs. There, he was awarded a Certificate of Excellence for achieving extremely high accuracy in the analysis of toxic elements in unknown water samples using ICP-MS instrumentation. Adams is also highly proficient in running liquid chromatography, ion chromatography and mass spectrometry time-of-flight analytical instrumentation.

Adams is a person of color whose ancestors include Africans and Native American Indians. He's also of Native American heritage, which he credits as inspiring his "Health Ranger" passion for protecting life and nature against the destruction caused by chemicals, heavy metals and other forms of pollution.

Adams is the founder and publisher of the open source science journal Natural Science Journal, the author of numerous peer-reviewed science papers published by the journal, and the author of the world's first book that published ICP-MS heavy metals analysis results for foods, dietary supplements, pet food, spices and fast food. The book is entitled Food Forensics and is published by BenBella Books.

In his laboratory research, Adams has made numerous food safety breakthroughs such as revealing rice protein products imported from Asia to be contaminated with toxic heavy metals like lead, cadmium and tungsten. Adams was the first food science researcher to document high levels of tungsten in superfoods. He also discovered over 11 ppm lead in imported mangosteen powder, and led an industry-wide voluntary agreement to limit heavy metals in rice protein products.

In addition to his lab work, Adams is also the (non-paid) executive director of the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center (CWC), an organization that redirects 100% of its donations receipts to grant programs that teach children and women how to grow their own food or vastly improve their nutrition. Through the non-profit CWC, Adams also launched Nutrition Rescue, a program that donates essential vitamins to people in need. Click here to see some of the CWC success stories.

With a background in science and software technology, Adams is the original founder of the email newsletter technology company known as Arial Software. Using his technical experience combined with his love for natural health, Adams developed and deployed the content management system currently driving NaturalNews.com. He also engineered the high-level statistical algorithms that power SCIENCE.naturalnews.com, a massive research resource featuring over 10 million scientific studies.

Adams is well known for his incredibly popular consumer activism video blowing the lid on fake blueberries used throughout the food supply. He has also exposed "strange fibers" found in Chicken McNuggets, fake academic credentials of so-called health "gurus," dangerous "detox" products imported as battery acid and sold for oral consumption, fake acai berry scams, the California raw milk raids, the vaccine research fraud revealed by industry whistleblowers and many other topics.

Adams has also helped defend the rights of home gardeners and protect the medical freedom rights of parents. Adams is widely recognized to have made a remarkable global impact on issues like GMOs, vaccines, nutrition therapies, human consciousness.

In addition to his activism, Adams is an accomplished musician who has released over a dozen popular songs covering a variety of activism topics.

Click here to read a more detailed bio on Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, at HealthRanger.com.

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