haxus_the_great

Interesting that they may have found a physiological explanation for this effect.

Just to note: the public health field has not availed itself well on this issue. From the earliest days of the pandemic, it was observed that current smokers were less prone to Covid infection than never/former smokers. This result played out again and again, in literally hundreds [1] of studies across the world.

[1] https://twitter.com/phil_w888/status/1279973073811197952

But virtually every time, public health folks would deny that smoking had any protective effect on Covid-19 infection at all. They called it a myth [2], insisted that some sort of statistical bias explained the discrepancy, and accused anyone who said otherwise of being in the pay of the tobacco industry [3].

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41533-021-00223-1 [3] https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1303

I can understand having strong priors like "smoking worsens respiratory disease" that would make one skeptical. I can understand being reluctant to inject any nuance into anti-smoking messages. But eventually you have to concede. Hopefully this is the tipping point.

I'm waiting to see how this turns out, but it'd be a real shame if the politics of smoking research meant that we missed out on a prophylactic that was right under our noses the whole time.

But how noteworthy is that? I'm sure programmers coming from C will appreciate it, but well-definedness is kind of… the bare minimum you'd expect from a modern language, especially a fairly high-level one like Go.

> use a liquid that doesn't contain nasty chemicals that cause popcorn lung syndrome, e.g. diacetyl

The levels of diacetyl found in (certain) vape liquids are probably not a concern. Cigarette smoke contains much higher concentrations of diacetyl and popcorn lung doesn't appear to be endemic in smokers.

Indeed most of the cases in medical literature seem to involve factory workers who were exposed to high amounts of diacetyl, plus a handful of people who consumed massive amounts of microwave popcorn. Are there any observed cases of popcorn lung in smokers?