Knock the Cigarette Out, says Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee

"If cancer is the quintessential product of modernity, then so, too, is its principal preventable cause: tobacco," writes Siddhartha Mukherjee in his 'The Emperor of all Maladies'.

This book, which won the Indian American cancer researcher and physician the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction for the year 2011, is a profound biography of cancer - a disease humans have lived with - and perished from - for more than five thousand years.

A staunch advocate of anti-tobacco movement, Dr Mukherjee goes to write, "The classification of tobacco smoke as a potent carcinogen - and the slow avalanche of forces unleashed to regulate cigarettes in the 1980s - is rightfully counted as one of cancer prevention's seminal victories."

In this embedded video, Dr Mukherjee says the first five things of preventing cancer are "Don't smoke, Don't smoke, Don't smoke, Don't smoke, Don't Smoke."

He adds, "There's a new study that makes the argument that if you take people who are high risk -- smokers that are high risk -- and you perform CAT scans, you can detect cancers. The problem is that for dollar for dollar, it's much better to knock the cigarette out of the person you see smoking outside... than to perform a 6000 dollar CAT scan."

Image courtesy http://stanmed.stanford.edu