Merry Christmas to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare

Presumably aroused by anti-tobacco letters to the New York Times, in the wake of the Great Cranberry Derby, the surgeon general of the United States, Dr. Leroy E. Burney, has added his melancholy bit in the drive to link tobacco with cancer. He has done so despite the cheerful evidence of many other doctors, possibly just as smart, or even smarter, that would tend to unlink them.

Now what connection Arthur S. Flemming’s premature brays about cranberries have with tobacco and cancer it would be difficult to say. In the former case, a definite chemical, a weed-killer called aminotriazole, was found in quantities suggesting that one could eat 15,000 pounds of cranberries a day for years without acquiring as much as a fever blister. In the case of tobacco, no comparable discovery has been made. There has been speculation that tars,nicotine, paper, perhaps over-televised filters might cause cancer, but this remains, to date, in the guesswork stage.

RT

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Robert Lewis Taylor

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Department of Health and Human Services

Presumably aroused by anti-tobacco letters to the New York Times, in the wake of the Great Cranberry Derby, the surgeon general of the United States, Dr. Leroy E. Burney, has added his melancholy bit in the drive to link tobacco with cancer. He has done so despite the cheerful evidence of many other doctors, possibly just as smart, or even smarter, that would tend to unlink them.

Now what connection Arthur S. Flemming’s premature brays about cranberries have with tobacco and cancer it would be difficult to say. In the former case, a definite chemical, a weed-killer called aminotriazole, was found in quantities suggesting that one could eat 15,000 pounds of cranberries a day for years without acquiring as much as a fever blister. In the case of tobacco, no comparable discovery has been made. There has been speculation that tars,nicotine, paper, perhaps over-televised filters might cause cancer, but this remains, to date, in the guesswork stage.