Cigarettes May Contain Bacteria

Nov. 24, 2009 -- Cigarettes are massive germ factories that may expose users and passersby to a swarm of disease-causing bacteria, a study shows.
It's well known that cigarette smoke harbors hundreds of toxic chemicals that are bad for your health. But a University of Maryland environmental health researcher says that's not the only danger. DNA examination of four cigarette brands shows, for the first time, that cigarettes are "widely contaminated" with hundreds of different types of bacteria. In fact, there appears to be as many bacteria in cigarettes as there are chemicals.
"The commercially available cigarettes that we tested were chock full of bacteria, as we had hypothesized, but we didn't think we'd find so many that are infectious in humans," says researcher Amy R. Sapkota, an assistant professor in the University of Maryland's School of Public Health.
Sapkota and microbial ecologists at the Ecole Centrale de Lyon in France examined the bacteria content in four major cigarette brands: Camel, Kool Filter Kings, Lucky Strike Original Red, and Marlboro Red and found similar types of bacteria in each one.
Previous research has watched for bacterial growth in lab dishes containing small tobacco samples, but this study is the first to scrutinize a cigarette's bacterial genetic makeup.