Tonight I’ll spend an hour being a guinea-pig. The Sunday Herald-Sun have enlisted my help in researching the effects of passive smoking. My task is to sit on a station platform for an hour (better take a good book), not cringing away from smokers quite as much as I usually do, and then go and perform a urine test.
My reward for this joyous activity? Merely the knowledge that I’m contributing to the cause of medical science. [Cough] Buy a paper on Sunday for the results.
It’s also Marita’s 34th birthday today. Head on over and wish her a good one. And yes, I’m going to the Bangarra performance too. Well, after the urine test that is.
8 replies on “The guinea pig”
Sounds like a good time to do your own experiment on the effects of flatulance on public smokers. I can just see the people you’d normally cringe away from cringing away from you, then getting puzzled/angry looks as you follow them around the platform!
Of course, I say that with some questionable Chinese food boiling away inside me…
-Ron
…hope the stall is unoccupied…
dude! It’s like your own version of Super-Size Me, except with cigarettes, and only for one hour . . . and less money and fame.
Do you know how many people they’re getting to do this?
heh! Nicotise me! I gather they’ve got people to go into a number of locations (some endured smokey pubs and clubs for several hours), to look at various locations of passive smoking.
I couldn’t do it… being the chronic asthmatic that I am (I can’t believe I used to smoke regularly anyway!). Go to Werribee station for best effect and walk up and down the ramp when there’s people getting off the train, if that isn’t an excercise in holding ones breath, I don’t know what is.
Without wanting to inflict injury on anyone, it would be interesting to have a broad cross-section of subjects for this experiment: pregnant woman, elderly, infant, obese, athletic, vegetarian, meat-eating, people who do shift-work, people with large nose, cats, dogs, etc. hey we’re not the only ones affected by second- hand cigarette smoke!
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live & let live, you don’t want to smoke… that’s fine, but correct me if I’m wrong, you deliberately go to public areas to be infused with cigarette smoke and then take samples to use as evidence against us smokers? strange behaviour to say the least! you’d be better off being concerned with the amount of polutants released by trucks, buses, trains & even your own car, or aren’t you aware of what they release? leave us smokers alone. we’re being treated like lepers enough without your personal vendetta as well Daniel.
I think 99% of smokers realise how annoying their smoke is to others, and minimise the impact on others. But it only takes one thoughtless person – the classic example is the person who takes the last breath from the ciggie as he boards the train, then exhales on-board.
The article as published didn’t express all this of course. They only ever take a snippet of what you said.
As for concerns about transport pollutants, I think you’ll find I certainly have my concerns, and I do my fair share for that particular cause.