Not anytime soon, it appears. Margrethe, who is, oddly enough, the patron of Denmark's Cancer Society, chain-smokes. And an article in a recent issue of The Lancet, the influential British medical journal, links the queen's example of public puffing to the rising mortality rate among Danish women. "In all the other developed countries," says the author of the piece, Prof. Hugo Kesteloot, a Belgian professor of cardiology and epidemiology, "female mortality is declining, but not in Denmark." And Kesteloot noted that the mortality rate for Danish women began to soar in 1978, six years after Margrethe, who favors Karelias, a Greek brand, ascended the throne.
The Danes are not particularly agitated by the professor's hypothesis. The queen—already dubbed "plague woman" and "the ashtray queen" by a Swedish newspaper columnist after she reportedly lit up while visiting a home for elderly asthmatics—says only, "I believe that most Danes have the opinion that, more or less, people should be permitted to do what they want to."
Steen Ulrik Johannessen, a reporter for Ritzau, the Danish news agency, casts the discussion as a matter of national honor: "We are not about to take seriously," he haughtily advises, "some theory by a Belgian professor."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
