Air pollution may contribute to development of lung cancer in never-smokers

How is this even news? I'd think that century-old health data would make it bleedin' obvious that heavy air pollution increases the incidence of lung cancer.

Century old? Did they have enough data on non smokers at that time to draw any hard conclusions?

A century ago, the idea that smoking causes cancer was quite new and was decades away from being conclusively proven.

Also many people heated their homes with coal or wood and the air quality in houses and cities was pretty bad even if you weren't a smoker. Asbestos was everywhere too.

Evidently "yes":

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Cancer_s...

(From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_tobacco )

We are still desperately trying to convince 30% of voting adults in the US that pollution is bad

> that smoking causes cancer was quite new

Hardly new, In Sketches, Old and New by Mark Twain in 1893, he treats the concept of: smoking being dangerous, as obviously known but annoying and he doesn't want to hear about it.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3189

In the article, which I read, it says that they can now definitively prove that the way it causes cancer is different from the way smoking causes cancer

Some of them literally think destroying the planet is a good thing because it'll prompt the rapture.

Gene: Ooh! I forgot about casino smell!

Bob: old cigarette smoke? Kids, this is how everything used to smell.

> Asbestos was everywhere too.

if you have data supporting that, please share it; it would be interesting (morbidly).

i think that's inaccurate because, while Romans knew of it (Pliny wrote of slaves getting breathing disease who worked with it), mining of it, largely for military uses didn't go crazy until the world wars, and surpluses from mining post wars was insidiously repurposed into the commercial sector particularly in california and in random other regions.

Which could be a problem. Smoking tends to cause "hot" cancers, with many mutations, and these cancers respond well to the checkpoint inhibitors that enable the immune system to more effectively attack the mutant proteins.

Wikipedia says "In 1912, American Dr. Isaac Adler was the first to strongly suggest that lung cancer is related to smoking." but I guess there could be other less strong suggestions before then. Regardless, I think it is true that it wasn't conclusively proven until decades later, and then took some more time for the general public to be aware.

That seems to tell us a lot about the correlation between smoking and lung cancer but I'm not sure how to read from it that there was enough data on non-smokers to talk with certainty about other environmental factors. My understanding is that after the push for women to start smoking around that time it would have been almost impossible to find study subjects who weren't at least exposed to high levels of second hand smoke.

Asbestos was widely used to insulate boilers and heating pipes/ductwork up until the 1970s or so. It's too bad it's such a health hazard because it's really a very effective substance for that purpose. It insulates well and it doesn't burn. Also widely used in car and truck brake pads. Sorry that's not really "data" but it is pretty common knowledge.