A man in the United States popped out to his local petrol station to buy a pack of cigarettes – only to find his card charged $23,148,855,308,184,500.

That is $23 quadrillion (£14 quadrillion) – many times the US national debt.

"I thought somebody had bought Europe with my credit card," said Josh Muszynski, from New Hampshire.

He says his appeals to his bank first met with little understanding, though it eventually corrected the error.

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Passive smoking could increase the risk of developing dementia by nearly a half, researchers have found.

A study discovered that people exposed to high levels of second-hand smoke were 44% more likely to have damage caused to their brain – affecting things like memory and the ability to perform calculations.

Scientists had already established that smokers are at a greater risk of suffering from dementia, but the study – led by a team from Cambridge_University – was the first to look at the effects of passive smoking.

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Being overweight or seriously underweight as a teenager curbs life expectancy as much as smoking 10 cigarettes a day, a study suggests.

Swedish researchers followed 46,000 men from the age of 18 for 38 years.

Being obese or smoking more than 10 a day doubled the premature death risk, the British Medical Journal reported.

Being overweight, seriously underweight or smoking 10 or less raised it by 30% – and interestingly the fat non-smoker ran the same risk as the fat smoker.

Those who were underweight – with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of less than 18.5 – had no increased risk of dying early, regardless of whether they smoked or not.

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The ban on smoking in public has failed to increase the number of people quitting, a report revealed yesterday.

The proportion of men who smoke has actually risen since the ban in July last year while there was no change at all among women.

The figures, coming after years of declining smoking rates, are a massive blow to Labour’s public heath policy.

A survey of almost 7,000 across all age groups found on average there was no change in the number of cigarettes that smokers said they had.

But in men aged 16 to 34, the number rose, by one and a half cigarettes a day.

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Most teenagers who smoke make repeated and naive attempts to quit, but have lost confidence in their ability to rid themselves of the addiction two years after taking that first puff, according to a new study.

Researchers in Montreal analyzed data from 319 teenagers who completed reports on their smoking habits every three months for five years.

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A Japanese company is developing a vending machine that counts wrinkles and skin sags to check a smoker’s age.

It plans to use face recognition technology to prevent anyone under the legal age of 20 buying cigarettes.

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A successful attempt to quit smoking may depend on where women are in their monthly cycle, say scientists.

Those trying before ovulation were more likely to reach for a cigarette again than those trying at other times, US scientists claimed.

Writing in the journal Addiction, the researchers said differing levels of female sex hormones were to blame.

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India is in the midst of a catastrophic epidemic of smoking-related deaths that will soon claim more than one million lives annually, according to groundbreaking new research.

“India is competing with China in this macabre Olympics of who has the most tobacco deaths in the world,” according to Prabhat Jha of the Centre for Global Health Research at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, the lead researcher.

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What is atherosclerosis?Atherosclerosis refers to the build up of plaque in the walls of the arteries leading to a reduction in the calibre of the vessel.

The narrowing does not occur suddenly but builds up over several years where cholesterol, fat and the smooth muscle cells lining the blood vessels have been transformed into a thickened, and sometimes calcified, mass.

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What is lung cancer?The cells of all living organisms normally divide and grow in a controlled manner. Cancer results when this control process is lost. A lump or tumour, known as the primary tumour can grow locally or spread to produce secondary tumours somewhere else in the body. This spreading process is called metastasis.

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