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In the summer, Ernest Grant sees skin burned by outdoor grills, fireworks, brush fires and motor vehicle collisions. In the winter, the burns are from wood stoves and kerosene heaters.
But, he said, there are certain types of serious burns that he treats all year long in the Jaycee Burn Center at UNC Hospitals, and those are the ones caused by fires started from cigarettes.
Grant, who is a nurse in the Jaycee Burn Center, said cigarette fires happen to the young and old. An elderly person smoking while using an oxygen machine can easily become relaxed enough to drop a burning cigarette. Other victims doze off before stubbing out their cigarettes, igniting their clothing or furniture.
Older smokers smoke at only half the rate of younger adults, and yet they are more than three times more likely to die in cigarette-related fires. And it is not just the smokers who are injured or killed in fires caused by cigarettes, Grant said — smokers’ children are most often the other victims.
But thanks to Grant, his colleagues and the results of research from Carolina’s Injury Prevention Research Center, smokers in North Carolina will soon be buying only fire-safe cigarettes.
Unlike regular cigarettes, fire-safe cigarettes have two or three bands of less- porous paper wrapped underneath the normal paper rolled around the tobacco. After you light a regular cigarette, it will slowly burn on its own all the way to the filter. Unless the cigarette is sitting in an ashtray or held safely away from its surroundings, the burning tobacco can easily ignite flammable clothing or furniture.
But the bands in fire-safe cigarettes act as speed bumps, allowing the cigarette to burn only until it reaches a band; then it extinguishes itself. The paper bands used in fire-safe cigarettes do not affect the taste or the cost, Grant said.
So Grant teamed up with his colleagues at UNC Hospitals and other Carolina researchers to start talks with state legislators, presenting the evidence that cigarettes account for most of the 100 or so fire-related deaths per year in North Carolina. And according to the Injury Prevention Research Center, using fire-safe cigarettes could prevent 50 to 60 fire-related deaths a year in North Carolina alone.
In 2005, there were more than 7,500 house fires in North Carolina. And of the many cigarette-burn patients Grant sees, most have been hurt in house fires. Even if people are lucky enough to escape such a blaze unburned, Grant said, “you might be out of a house for while.”
Grant’s arguments worked. According to new legislation in North Carolina, come 2010, every packet of cigarettes behind every convenience store counter in the state should bear a fire-safe stamp.
This legislation has been a long time coming, Grant said. Tobacco companies have known for decades how to make fire-safe cigarettes, but only in the past few years have individual states begun to pass legislation requiring the companies to manufacture them.
In 2007, the North Carolina-based RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company — the second-largest tobacco company in the country — announced that it would begin producing only fire-safe cigarettes by the end of 2009. For the biggest tobacco-producing state in the country, Grant said, that is a pretty big deal.
Provided by the Division of
Research and Economic Development.
Editor: Neil Caudle
Writer: Margarite Nathe