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Melissa Blasiol talks with Brandon Newton about the results of his test at the Tompkins Martin medical office building. PHOTOS BY BEN FREDMAN/THE FREE LANCE-STAR View More Images from this story Visit the Photo Place

Test measures CO gas from smoking

Stop-smoking screening at Mary Washington Hospital features carbon monoxide monitor

Date published: 11/21/2008

BY JIM HALL

James Cash hasn't smoked in nearly 60 years so he was not surprised at the score he got yesterday at the stop-smoking screening at Mary Washington Hospital.

Cash held his breath for Eletta Hansen, a registered nurse and tobacco treatment specialist, then exhaled into her carbon monoxide monitor.

"Blow, blow, blow," Hansen coaxed him.

When Cash finished, the machine displayed his reading: zero. His body was free of the poison gas.

Cash said he started smoking in June 1944, on D-Day at Omaha Beach.

"Somebody gave me a cigarette that night and said you look like you need a cigarette," he said. "I said I need something."

He smoked Camels, Chesterfields and Lucky Strikes, he said, whatever the Army gave him. He smoked for five years, until Dec. 31, 1949, then quit and hasn't smoked since. Today he is 86 and lives in Bowling Green.

Cash was among the two dozen people who stopped at the hospital's Great American Smokeout promotion, set up in the lobby of the Tompkins-Martin Medical Plaza in Fredericksburg.

For the first time, the program included a free screening with a "Smokerlyzer," a small black box that measures carbon monoxide.

"We have to keep looking for a new message," Hansen said. "People get weary, and they don't pay attention to the old messages."

Carbon monoxide is a byproduct of smoking cigarettes, the same gas that comes from a car's exhaust. For the smoker, it's in the blood where it competes with oxygen.

"Basically, it's reducing your oxygen supply," said Melissa Blasiol, a wellness worker at the hospital.

A pack-a-day smoker will register a reading of 20 or more on the Smokerlyzer. When she took the test, Otelia Ford had a reading of 5.

"You are around some secondhand smoke or some kind of environmental pollution," Hansen told her.

Ford, a hospital worker and resident of Spotsylvania, was puzzled. She does not smoke, she said, or live with a smoker.

Perhaps the cause was a leak in her car's exhaust, Hansen said, or something in her workplace.

"You've got a little bit of carbon monoxide in your blood stream," she added.

The Great American Smokeout is now in its 33rd year. It is sponsored by the American Cancer Society to encourage the nation's 45 million smokers to quit.

Cigarette smoking in the U.S. was down slightly last year, after three years of little change, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Still, smokers represent nearly 20 percent of the U.S. adult population. And smoking remains a leading cause of heart disease, emphysema, cancer and stroke.

"There is nothing good about it," said Dr. Timothy Sherwood, a thoracic surgeon at Mary Washington.

Jim Hall: 540/374-5433
Email: jhall@freelancestar.com

PERCENTAGE OF U.S. ADULTS WHO SMOKE: 2007 2006 2005 2004 SMOKING FACTS Yesterday, a pack of Marlboro at the 7-Eleven on Amaret Street in Fredericksburg cost $3.97, including the tax. If you sit in a smoky bar for two hours, you inhale the equivalent of four cigarettes. If you ride for an hour in a closed car with a smoker, you inhale three cigarettes. Eletta Hansen's stop-smoking props at yesterday's Great American Smokeout promotion included a "tar jar," with the black gunk deposited on a smoker's lungs. Eletta Hansen also had foam models of diseased and healthy lungs, one black and the other tan. Her plastic cigarette was about 4 feet tall and 8 inches around. It represented the 7,300 cigarettes that a pack-a-day smoker consumes each year.

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Date published: 11/21/2008