Cigarette smoke has been shown to trigger aberrant signaling pathways and pathophysiological processes; however, the regulatory mechanisms underlying smoke-induced gene expression remain to be established. Herein, we observed that two smoke-responsive genes, HO-1 and CYP1A1, are robustly induced upon smoke by different mechanisms in human bronchial epithelia. CYP1A1 is mediated by aryl hydrocar...

Airway dendritic cells (DCs) play a key role in smoke-related lung diseases; however, the acute effects of tobacco smoke on human airway DCs in vivo are unknown. A total of 16 smokers underwent bronchoalveolar lavage at two time-points: directly after a 4-h period of nonsmoking (no smoke exposure); and directly after a 4-h period during which eight cigarettes were smoked (acute smoke exposure)....

Smoke-free policies have been an important tobacco control intervention. As recently as 20 years ago, few communities required workplaces and hospitality venues to be smoke-free, but today approximately 11% of the world's population live in countries with laws that require these places to be smoke-free. This paper briefly summarises important milestones in the history of indoor smoke-free polic...

H ealth agencies have warned of the danger of secondhand smoke for decades. Now a small but growing number of scientists are testing the possible health effects associated with the residue that cigarette smoke deposits on furniture, clothing, and other surfaces, a substance some are calling “thirdhand smoke.” The magnitude of the problem, the amount of attention and resources it warrants, and e...

OBJECTIVE To investigate differences in clinical features between tobacco smoke-induced and biomass fuel-induced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). METHODS We retrospectively analyzed 206 patients with COPD caused by exposure to tobacco smoke and 81 cases of COPD caused by exposure to biomass fuels who received treatment in our hospital between 2011 March and 2014 March. Difference...

Smoke detection calls for a reliable and fast distinction between background, moving objects and variable shapes that are recognizable as smoke. In our system we propose a stable background suppression module joined with a smoke detection module working on segmented objects. It exploits two features: the energy variation in wavelet model and a color model of the smoke. The decrease of energy ra...

Nine asymptomatic smokers each smoked one cigarette of their usual brand on four separate occasions. The inhaled smoke volume was measured by tracing the smoke with the inert gas 81Krm. Puffing indices were recorded by using an electronic smoking analyser and flowhead/cigarette holder. The expired air carbon monoxide concentration was measured immediately before and within 5 min of finishing sm...

Light scatting characteristic of smoke particles plays an important role for the developing of photoelectric smoke detection technology. An experimental setup is built to measure the Stokes scattering matrix for typical smoke particles. The results show that the non-spherical properties of smoke particles play an important role on their light scattering characteristic. It is also shown that the...

Finding smoke in surveillance videos can be crucial in early detection of fire emergencies. Such early detections improve damage prevention and control by enabling the authorities to take the necessary precautionary steps. This paper describes a smoke detection technique developed for videos taken in visual band. The method makes use of optical flow and color filtering to detect smoke covered r...

OBJECTIVE To examine levels of support for comprehensive smoke-free policies in six large Chinese cities. METHODS Data from Wave 1 of the International Tobacco Control (ITC) China Survey (April-August 2006) were analysed. The ITC China Survey employed a multistage sampling design in Beijing, Shenyang, Shanghai, Changsha, Guangzhou and Yinchuan (none of which has comprehensive smoke-free polic...