Defend the Newham

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The Newham 8 - Asian The Newham 8 - Asian youths aged between 15 and 21 - face charges of conspiracy as well as threatening behaviour and actual bodily harm.

They were arrested on September 24 1982 after an incident with plain-clothes police officers. In the previous week there had been three major racist attacks on Asian schoolchildren at Little Ilford School, in Newham, and an incident where 60 or 70 white youth with iron bars and sticks went on the rampage in East Ham and Manor Park.

Send invitations for speakers, or resolutions of support, to Newham 8 Defence Campaign, c/o PO Box 273, London E7 9JN. TA4: ANSPIRACY FEW PEOPLE would deny that tobacco smoking is largely responsible for the plague of lung cancer is the older half of our population.

As with most cancer-causing substances, it is difficult to say how tobacco causes cancer, but research from America recentiy published shows one possible way - with an amazing link to radiation in the air!

Radium Many buildings are made from materials containing small amounts of radioactive elements like radium, while the soil they stand in also contains such elements.

Radium decays slowly into radon, a radioactive gas which then escapes into air inside buildings from the structure itself or from the soil via unpaved basements or damp. porous walls. Radon can then decay into other radioactive substances such as isotopes of polonium, lead and bismuth.

These substances produce a type of radiation knows as alpharadiation - they produce alphaparticles. This is not terribly dangerous (alpha-particles are stopped by a few centimetres of air or a thin layer of clothing, or even the dead layer on the surface of our skin) unless they are produced in the lungs. Here, an alpha particle may have enough energy to break into the living cells lining our lungs and damage the DNA inside, possibly causing cancerous change.

Now radon and other radioactive particles enter and leave the lungs every time we breathe, producing a small risk that they may decay and give off their radiation while inside the lungs.

But, according to Edward Martell of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in the USA, smoking massively increases the risk from these substances.

Particles of tar in tobacco smoke attract these radioactive elements and then make them settle in the lungs where they are able to do maximum damage when they do decay.

..Martell calculates that small regions of lung tissue can receive quite high doses of radiation. For example, a 20-a-day smoker for 40 years will receive a cumulative dose of 100 rads - enough to trigger off cancer (as well as spending £15,000 at 1983 prices).

Uranium

Support for Martell's theory comes from the fact that uranium miners who smoke tend to contract lung cancer four times faster than other smokers.

Also at risk from radioactive smoke are 'secondary smokers' people who live or work with smokers - and research has shown that secondary smokers have poorer health than more fortunate non-smokers.

An interesting thought is that one way in which the release of polonium from Windscale in 1957 (see SO 127):) could have had its effect on health is through its being mopped up by tobacco smoke.

FEAR AT WORK. a public meeting tonight (8pm, Thursday April This meeting is about fighting job blackmail - the way that employers impose unsafe working conditions by the threat of unemployment. It is also about how powerful vested interests try to make environmentalists appear 'anti-worker', caring more about the environment than unemployment.

One speaker will be Richard Kazis, co-author of 'Fear at Work' (which I will try to review when I get a copy of it), and member of the US group "Environmentalists for Full Employment' Place. The Black House Rathbone Place, London WI (near Tottenham Court Ro underground). Sponsored by BSSRS and Trade Union Bookservice.

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no.129 April GAY LPYS. Next meeting Sunday May 1, 6pm at "LONDON May Day march and rally: assemble 12 noon