Smoking may not only kill you, it can kill your pets as well. “Cats that live with cigarette smokers are twice as likely to develop feline lymphoma,” says Antony Moore of Tufts University. Feline lymphoma is a deadly cancer of the blood and immune system. “It was believed that the major cause of feline lymphoma was feline leukaemia virus,” he says. “But the results of our study clearly indicate that exposure to environmental factors such as second-hand tobacco smoke has devastating consequences for cats.”
Doctors blame a lot of human ills on our sedentary lifestyle, and it?s the same for cats. The modern housecat spends most of the day sleeping indoors and constantly re-breathes the same stale tobacco smoke. They also swallow large quantities of contaminated dust, soot and ash when they groom themselves.
Moore studied 180 cats at a Tufts veterinary hospital between 1993 and 2000 and found that cats exposed to second-hand smoke had more than double the risk of acquiring the disease. In households where they were exposed to smoke for five years or more, cats tripled their risk. And cats living with two smoking owners had four times the cancer risk.
Young children are often exposed to the same passive smoking dangers as cats. They also spend too much time indoors and swallow large amounts of dust and dirt when they put objects in their mouths. This research may help doctors understand the causes of non-Hodgkins lymphoma in humans, since it?s very similar to feline lymphoma and its causes are unknown.
Pets suffer from the same diseases as their owners, such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes. As well as breathing in passive smoke, they eat overly rich diets and don?t exercise enough. However, like humans, they still can live to an old age because of increasingly good veterinary care.
Take your cat for a brisk walk and look at the crop circles, since they?re now appearing in the U.S. too. To learn the scientific facts behind this mystery, read ?The Deepening Complexity of Crop Circles? by Eltjo Haselhoff, click here.
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