Amanda Eller / Facebook[/caption] A nurse from North Carolina is using Facebook to get in the faces – and heads – of cigarette smokers. IFL Science reports that Amanda Eller used the social media site to provide a very real and unsettling look at how cigarette smoke impairs the respiratory system in humans. In the video, there is placed on a table in a medical facility two sets of lungs. One from a smoker of one pack a day for twenty years and the other lungs from a ‘healthy person’. The first thing one notices is that the smoker’s lungs are entirely black, a result of the inhalation and retention of tar and other pollutants in cigarettes. The healthy pair exhibits the usual red and pink hue.
George Hodan / PublicDomainPictures.net[/caption] When stimulated, the healthy lungs expand fully and slowly collapse as the simulated breath exits the organ. The smoker’s lungs do not inflate as much and quickly retract when the artificial breath passes through it. “The elastance is gone,” Eller says of the smoker lungs in the video. “So they will stretch out but then the recoil of them just snaps right back because there’s nothing left to hold them open.” Accompanying her video, Eller writes in the caption “Cancerous, 1 pack per day for 20 years lungs 😳 versus healthy lungs. Still wanna smoke?”
Wikimedia Commons[/caption] As IFL Science notes, “Around 443,000 deaths in the US are attributed to smoking cigarettes every year, according to the Centre for Disease Control (CDC), with lung cancer accounting for around 138,000 of these mortalities. Shocking statistics and probably ones you’ve heard before, but people appear to be more shocked out of their smoking habit by visceral displays like the one shown in the above videos, which have been shared over 500,000 times.” One viewer of the video commented, “That’s it, no more. I am DONE smoking I swear to the LORD I just had my last cigarette.” Theresa Doggett Henderson, another commenter, posted, “Wow! Very neat to see this. I’m gonna show this to my dad.” If you are not squeamish at all, check out the video for yourself.