• Question: What does smoking do to the immune system?

    Asked by Maria Altarriba to Carmen, Daniel, Laura, Noel, Steph on 16 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Noel Carter

      Noel Carter answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      The main thing smoking does is that it has lots of chemicals in the smoke that damage DNA. This makes cells behave badly so they do things like start to grow without stopping and become a cancer. The immune system cells may get damaged and become a cancer of the immune system so it no longer works correctly. However, the most common cancer from smoking is lung cancer as lung cells get damaged most

    • Photo: Carmen Denman

      Carmen Denman answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      Smoking does a zillion bad things to many organs in your body. One thing that really interested me is some of the poisons added to smoking tobacco actually ‘paralyse’ some of lung cells natural ability to clear infection and rehydrate our lungs. We have cells lined with cillia and those are like tiny little hairs that can move and trap gunk and bacteria up and out of our airways by us coughing for example. If these cillia stop working (like in cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that affects multiple organs including the lungs) there becomes a build up of bacteria and the lungs can’t clear that away, leading to infection and reduced lung function, both things common in smokers.

      Cheers!
      Carmen

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