Passive Smoking

The facts behind passive smoking.

Passive smoking, more commonly known as second hand smoke, is responsible for 3,000 lung cancer deaths in nonsmoking adults and impairs the respiratory system of hundreds of thousands of children per year.

The problem with passive smoking is that the one breathing in the smoke does not have any choice in their actions. Second hand smoke is composed of two different smokes: sidestream smoke and mainstream smoke. Sidestream smoke comes from the lighted cigarette, cigar, or pipe while mainstream smoke is the smoke exhaled by the smoker. These two combine to produce second hand smoke, which contains over 4,000 chemicals proven to be harmful to human bodies. When a smoker is nearby, they endanger those around them by putting these chemicals into the air and forcing nonsmokers to breathe them.

It has been proven that separating smokers and nonsmokers in a room can decrease the exposure to passive smoking, but not eliminate it. Passive smoking is known to induce lung cancer and heart diseases in otherwise healthy nonsmoking adults. Also, children of smoking parents have been found to be more susceptible to respiratory infections and are generally slower at developing lung function as the lung matures. Though many may believe that the effects of passive smoking are negligible, this is obviously not the case. Passive smoking does endanger those around you, so be considerate and if you MUST smoke, please do it somewhere else.