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Monday 26 September 2011

Are RIP (Reduced Ignition Propensity) cigarettes necessary?

 Picture thief taken from Pat Nurse MA

Apart from the fact that these bastardised cigarettes make people ill, as I pointed out on Saturday, will these chemically treated cigs actually save lives? We have had regulations here in the UK regarding fire retardant soft furnishings since 1988 and many amendments since, some amendments as recent as 2005/6, which has caused much controversy throughout the hotel and bed & breakfast industry.

It would appear that the majority of house fires are in the winter months says an insurance company, who should know such statistics, and they list five contributory factors and smoking comes in at number 4:

  • Faulty Christmas lighting and decorations are major reasons why December has more fires in the home than any other month.
  • The popularity and use of candles and oil burners around the home as an aesthetic design feature.
  • Heaters and open fires being left unattended as temperatures drop.
  • People smoking indoors due to colder and wetter weather.
  • Faulty or misused household appliances such as electric heaters, electric blankets and cookware used more commonly in the winter.
No surprises there as far as I can see as most of our household appliances and decorations, those things that make our lives a bit easier and bearable, are capable of killing us in a house fire. Technology has greatly reduced those appliances ability to harm us but still we get house fires that maim and kill, why is that? There are only two reasons I can see and the one uppermost in my mind is the terminally STUPID, I mean, who would smoke in bed? Most people these days do not smoke in bed but there is always one that has the stupid gene. Do you regulate by law for the terminally stupid? If you did would that stop them from being stupid?

The other reason I can see is accidental. With the greatest will in the world you will never stop accidents from happening, oh yes, you can greatly reduce the prevelance of accidents but how far into the realms of fantasy does governments and lobbyists have to go because they have a bee in their bonnet about something they do not do, but want you to stop doing it. But where do most accidents occur domestically, and why?

Well I was surprised to find out it was not the bathroom as I was prevously led to believe:

Accidents are classified into various categories, which are generally determined by the cause and the persons or things involved in the occurrence. Some of the most common types of accidents are:
- Home accidents
- Highway accidents involving vehicles
- Workplace accidents
Here we will consentrate on number one, home accidents, as the bansterbators who pushed for the RIP bands in our cigarettes use home fire accidents to push for the poisoning of smokers so they can go to bed at night and self flagellate while having an orgasm over their triumph.

Most home accidents occur in living or dining rooms. These are the places where children spend most of their time. On the other hand, the kitchen is also a common place for accidents at home because of sharp objects and hot surfaces. Slipping cases typically occur on stairs.
So most home accidents take place where an adult rules and works, most typically mothers/women, and have a duty of care towards anyone who enters their abode, adult or child, (and why does it take an act of some countries parliaments to make an adult comply with their very own intuition?) So, thinking of the children, do we ban cookers? Do we ban knives and forks? Do we make, by an act of parliament, objects that are sharp round, like tables? Or do we make gas cooking a thing of the past and use electric rings that are so low in heat outage that touching a hob would warm your hands on a cold winters day?

But I have digressed long enough away from the subject of the impending (in the case of that testbed of new legislation, Scotland, it has now arrived, well, you gotta have a guinea pig I suppose,) RIP act (yes, I can see the bansterbatory joke at us smokers) passed by our sovereign masters in Brussels and our dutiful masters, pupets of the EU elected politicians in Whitehall will implement it with vigour on the 17th of November. Actually some of you should be aware that your cigs are not the same because by that date there, by dictat, will be no 'ordinary' cigs on the shelves as this is a rolling process that must, again by dictat from the EU, be completed by the 17th of next month.

Testing, 1,2,3, testing.

The department of the deputy prime minister has done some testing on the fire safe cigarette against the 'ordinary' cigarette not doctored by RIP chemicals. They sum up their intentions at the beginning of the report thus:

Comparisons of the propensity of firesafe cigarettes and conventional cigarettes to ignite textile materials used in a domestic environment
 As I have stated above the UK government in the past made laws forcing manufacturers of soft furnishings, like settees, bedding, carpets, curtains etc to be treated with fire retardant chemicals so households these days are made much more fire safe due to legislation than they once were. So I am assuming that everything I have around me in the soft furnishing department is low risk to my accidental dropping of a cigarette onto said furnishings. But I do realise that prolonged 'red' or 'white' heat will combust anything near to it, no matter what chemicals are put on them, but that would take an awefull lot of heat and domestic premisis do not have that level of energy.

The purpose of this programme of work was to undertake comparative cigarette ignition tests on a range of textile and related materials used in domestic furnishing that is available at the lower price end of the UK market. Each test sample was subjected to one type of UK typical mass market, “low cost” cigarette and two types of USA Fire Safe Cigarettes, claimed to be of Reduced Ignition Potential (RIP). By incorporating repeat testing a statistically based comparison of the likelihood of ignition of the chosen test samples by each of the three types of cigarette was determined.
The test materials were selected from new materials available at the low price end of the UK market. The selection was divided into different groups of materials as follows.
These were textile furnishing materials that are used alone or in contact with other furnishing materials. They were chosen so as to contain at least a significant proportion of cellulose fibre (usually cotton) so that there was a likelihood of combustion with
current UK cigarettes.
These materials were representative of bed sheets/blankets, throws, scatter cushion covers and mattress covers.
As I said in my last post called Dunce! I have no head for all this statistical analyst gobbledegook so I have included the full report in my post below and await your interpretation of it in the comments.

Talk, enjoy and educate me ffs because I am lost in a mire of misdirection.



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7 comments:

Pat Nurse MA said...

Please stop calling them RIP cigs even when quoting the smokerphobics. We must all refuse to play this stupid word game.

Refer to them only as LIP cigs - Lower Ignition Propensity.

DO NOT SPREAD THEIR VILE AND OFFENSIVE TAG FURTHER.

REFUSE TO REPEAT IT AND REMEMBER LIP !!!

Unknown said...

Sorry Pat, I could not resist using that in the title to emphasise the anti smoking brigade's asumption that smokers are dead men/women walking. We/I have emphasized many a time that this is not the case as more and more smokers reach 100 and shout it from the rooftops.

This post will be the last time I will pay LIP service to these RIP bastards (see what I did there Pat?).

It was something I had to get out of my system and it has now been purged from there.

Pat Nurse MA said...

Fair dos TBY. Sorry for shouting :) But the only way this offensive tag will become common speak is if we let it and we must not.

Unknown said...

No need to be sorry Pat, what you say I wholeheartidly agree with. As I've said before I don't like people using the word 'fags' for cigarettes as it has negative cconnotations that labels me/us in a derogatory nature and I will not be treated as subhuman because I smoke, especially from non smokers but more increasingly ex smokers.

I am not being parinoid here when thinking that 'they' are out to get me, I KNOW they are, so much evidence abounds for me not to be worried.

They'll get my dead cold body before I cow tow to them and they will have to wait a long, long time to gloat over it.

Be safe, be happy and enjoy the life that the bansterbators want to take away from you. The most important thing in life is YOU and your family, don't let the bastards take that away, I won't!

I'm not a hippy type but love, happiness and prosperity to you and yours. (Oh, and I forgot peace, we all deserve some peace, not much to ask for, is it?)

XX

timbone said...

I have been smoking on and off since I was 12, that is 42 years. I have smoked anywhere and everywhere over the years, including hiding lit cigarettes in pumps at school, smoking in bed and whilst servicing a motor car!

The LIPRIP (sorry Pat) has a major problem. There is a tendency for the lit end to fall off when it reaches the band, deadly if you are driving.....what was that? I see, another reason to ban it in cars.

Kin_Free said...

Please do correct me if you find fault but the study highlighted above (yudo doc) is not conclusive evidence that LIP cigarettes are any safer than ordinary ones - they are MORE likely to cause fatal fires as far as I can see. I assume that there must be other, more convincing studies.

The author has engaged in a little ‘spin’ relating to the results by lumping together ‘progressive smoldering’ and ‘flaming ignition’ to provide an overall positive result, stating that typically 91% of the standard cigarette caused flaming OR smouldering ...reducing to 69% and 34% for the LIP cigarettes. However, It seems he/she was reluctant to highlight the ‘flaming ignition’ results in isolation. (Why?)

(See chapter 6 analysis of results - table, summary and comments)

While normal cigarettes were MORE likely to produce smoldering (82 versus 41 and 17 instances)- they were LESS LIKELY to cause flaming ignition :- Only 4 instances for L&B compared with 21 for Camel (LIP) and 14 Merit (LIP)! Camel were FIVE times, and Merit Three times more likely to ‘flame’ than L&B. Smoke inhalation is undoubtedly a killer but, I’m sure there is more chance of surviving a ‘smoldering’ fire as opposed to a ‘flaming’ fire - more time to be alerted from sleep by a smoke alarm and more likely to be able to escape. Note also that LIP cigs are supposed to work by extinguishing themselves YET the results show that ordinary L&B burned over their full length only 22 times compared with 16 times for Camel and 49 times for Merit.

In the conclusions; Chapter 7, the author, give him his due (or more likely covering his back), actually acknowledges that there are “questions that remain unanswered” and also questions the validity of statistics relating to ‘smoking materials’.

Kin_Free

Unknown said...

Nothing to correct Kin_free. I wanted someone, anyone, to explain this type of analysis. Any analysis to do with smoking leaves me cold with all their gobblydegook words. Hopefully I am a bit more enlightened by your comment above. (I can be rather thick sometimes.)

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