Daily HealthBeat Tip

Dangerous light

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I'm Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

Reduced nicotine cigarettes. Sound like they'd be at least less dangerous than the regular ones, right? Judging from a recent poll, a lot of people think so. Researchers did a random sample telephone survey of more than 2,000 adult smokers. The study supported by the National Institutes of Health is in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Researcher Richard O'Connor of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York:

"Twenty-five percent of smokers who had heard of reduced-exposure products thought that they were less dangerous than regular cigarettes. It is in fact not true that reduced-exposure tobacco products are less dangerous than traditional cigarettes. But they do think so." (12 seconds)

O'Connor thinks ads for the cigarettes can mislead people even if the ads don't specifically have any health message.

Learn more at www.hhs.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I'm Ira Dreyfuss.

Last revised: October 10, 2005

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