Smoking is something that has come under deep scrutiny all over the United States in recent years, and many jurisdictions have banned it in public places like restaurants and bars. However, what happens when you set out to see on a cruise? Can you smoke, or will you need to leave your Marlboro Lights at home? Obviously, you can't just step off a cruise ship to have a cigarette, so this is a serious concern for smokers.
Thankfully, most cruise lines do allow smoking at least in limited areas on board. Because they don't want to lose the revenue they would generate from smokers, they have designated specific areas of their ships for the purpose of smoking. The issue here is that they don't want to alienate their non-smoking guests by allowing it everywhere, but they want to provide the option.
Where Can You Smoke on a Cruise?
The places where smoking is allowed on cruise ships depends on the cruise line you are using. For example, according to CruiseDiva.com, Carnival Cruise Lines allows passengers to smoke in cabins, casinos and certain lounges while aboard, but not in other common areas of the ship, while Disney Cruises does not allow passengers to smoke in their individual cabins, but they can use the balconies.
Obviously, it can be difficult to keep these rules straight if you are a fan of both smoking and cruising. However, you can get this information up front from the cruise line to help make your decision.
Where Can't You Smoke on a Cruise?
The most common area where smoking is not allowed aboard the ship will be anywhere that children like to congregate. Family cruises are intended to protect everyone's interests, so restaurants and indoor activities where children might be present will probably have no-smoking signs posted everywhere. However, adults-only areas such as bars will most likely allow smoking.
Additionally, as mentioned above, most cruises don't allow smoking in cabins and on private balconies, and if you break the rules, you will likely be charged a hefty fee for cleaning. The reason for this is that cabins are often difficult to ventilate on a cruise ship, which means that future guests might be bothered by the residual smell of smoke.
What About Cigars and Pipes
In most cases, smokers of all types will be treated the exact same way, and will have the same opportunities to enjoy their habits. The one major exception is for cigar smokers who choose cruises where cigar rooms exist, in which case they will be able to smoke there, but pipe and cigarette smokers will not. A cigar room is an area of the ship dedicated to the storage, sale and enjoyment of cigars.
In fact, many cruise lines have ships with humidors on board, as cigars can become a healthy source of revenue for the company.
Source:
CruiseDiva.com, Smoke on the Water
Only two bird watchers in history have ever seen more than 8,000 of the approximately 9,600 species of birds found on our planet. Phoebe Snetsinger, of Missouri, was one of the two. Her father, Leo Burnett, was the ad exec who helped bring the Jolly Green Giant, the Marlboro Man, Toucan Sam, Charlie the Tuna, Morris the Cat, the Pillsbury Doughboy and Tony the Tiger into our lives. Why is that important when discussing a birder? Easy: money! Only 900 species are found in the US and Canada, so a serious birder needs to have enough dough to travel around the world.
To give you some perspective on just what an fantastic accomplishment seeing 8,000 birds is, consider this:
Only 250 or so people have ever hit the 5,000 mark. Only 100 people have made it to 6,000 and only 12 or so have seen more than 7,000. In addition to money, serious birding requires time and strict adherence to the rules. There are birders who’ve been blacklisted for cheating and others that have fought over what actually constitutes a sighting (some birders say if you “hear” a bird, you’ve seen it.)
Phoebe Snetsinger (with a name like that, you’re a born birder, eh?) only became a serious bird watcher after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given six months to live. It’s quite possible that counting, or listing as it’s sometimes called, actually helped her beat that diagnosis; she lived not just another year, but another 17 years! And she would have lived longer, no doubt, were birding not such a dangerous hobby. Yes, on top of the financial independence and time, one also needs a certain amount of courage to trek into the wild, deep into jungles and forests of enormous size.
In 1999, on a birding trip to Madagascar, as she prepared to see her 8,500th bird, Snetsinger was killed in a freak car accident in the middle of nowhere. So, in the end, cancer didn’t do her in, but her obsessive hobby did.
Not that many moons ago, if you asked an ornithologist how many species of birds there were, s/he would have said about 6,000. Five years from now, they expect there will be more like 18,000. It’s not that birds are evolving, it’s more that we’re changing our definitions of what we call a species. Who knows how many of those 18,000 Snetsinger could have crossed off her list.
Any serious birders out there? How many have you counted? What’s your best birding story?
The tobacco in cigarettes hosts a bacterial bonanza — literally hundreds of different germs, including those responsible for many human illnesses, a new study finds.
“Nearly every paper that you pick up discussing the health effects of cigarettes starts out with something to the effect that smokers and people exposed to secondhand smoke experience high rates of respiratory infections,” notes Amy Sapkota of the University of Maryland, College Park. The presumption has been that smoking renders people vulnerable to disease by impairing lung function or immunity. And it may well do both.
“But nobody talks about cigarettes as a source of those infections,” she says. Her new data now suggest that’s distinctly possible.
If these germs are alive, something she has not yet confirmed, just handling cigarettes or putting an unlit one to the mouth could be enough to cause an infection.
The idea that tobacco might contain viable germs isn’t just idle conjecture. Several research teams have isolated bacteria from tobacco that they could grow out in petri dishes. Those earlier investigations tended to hunt for — and, when found, attempted to grow — only one or two species of interest, Sapkota says.
What’s novel in her study: She and her colleagues probed for genetic material from any and every bacterium in a cigarette’s tobacco. Under sterile conditions, the researchers opened up cigarettes and then performed a series of tests on the leafy bits. For instance, they isolated all of the ribosomal material and then homed in on its long, species-specific stretches known as 16S regions. These genetic segments were then compared to 16S patches characteristic of known bacterial species.
Sapkota’s team had 16S probes for close to 800 different bacteria and found matches to many hundreds in the four brands of cigarettes screened: Marlboro Red, Camel, Kool Filter Kings and Lucky Strike Original Red. These cigarettes are “among the most commonly smoked brands in Westernized countries and represent three major tobacco companies,” Sapkota notes. All were purchased in Lyon, France, where she was completing her postdoctoral studies.
Among the large number of germs whose DNA laced these cigarettes were: Campylobacter, which can cause food poisoning and Guillain-Barre Syndrome; Clostridium, which causes food poisoning and pneumonias; Corynebacterium, also associated with pneumonias and other diseases; E. coli; Klebsiella, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Stenotrophomonas maltophilia, all of which are associated not only with pneumonia but also with urinary tract infections; and a number of Staphylococcus species that underlie the most common and serious hospital-associated infections.
Sapkota’s team lists many of these — including the most prevalent bacteria in the tobacco they studied — in a paper published early, online in Environmental Health Perspectives.
Some people have criticized the idea of infectious cigarettes, arguing that as tobacco burns, it would kill any germs present. But Sapkota is not so sure that’s true. The tobacco farthest from the burning tip might be a balmy temperature, from a bacterial point of view. And here’s “a really wild idea,” she says: What if the smoke particles traveling through the still-unburned part of a cigarette pick up some germs and then ferry them deeply into the lung, where they’re unlikely to be cleared? Wouldn’t that be the prescription for disease?
Of course, there’s also plenty of chances for a smoker to become exposed prior to lighting up. And, of course, the potential for highest oral exposure would come from chewing tobacco — and nasal exposures from snuff.
Sapkota, an environmental health scientist, plans to follow up her preliminary data to see which types of tobacco are most likely to host viable germs, and whether those bacteria are transported into the body, either during smoking or by the insertion of unburned tobacco products (including chewing tobacco) into the mouth.
Several thousand potentially toxic chemicals have been isolated from cigarettes. Sapkota says that it’s not hard to imagine that the number of germs hosted by tobacco products could rival that of the carcinogens and other poisons residing in or produced by burning tobacco.
How so, when she’s only found genetic material indicting hundreds of germs? Owing to the bacterial probes available when Sapkota began her tobacco work, she was only able to screen for 700-odd species. But newer probes on the market can now screen for the bacterial 16S genetic material of 5,000 or more germs. And if she used such huge batteries of probes now, she said she fully expects she could turn up at least 1,000 hitchhiking bacterial species in tobacco products.
Image: Flickr/alphadesigner
See Also:
- The Cigarette of the Future: All the Cancer, None of the Nicotine
- Philip Morris Tries to Engineer the Cancer Out of Tobacco
- Toxic Soup: Plastics Could Be Leaching Chemicals Into Ocean
- Anti-Smoking Drug Succeeds When Antidepressants Fail
- Darker Skin Linked to Nicotine Dependence
- The Inevitable USB Powered Cigarette
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