Can the Smoking of Others Hurt You?
Millions of persons suffer serious, and often fatal, harm because someone else smoked. For example, if a mother smokes, her unborn baby is often damaged. In fact, it may be killed even before it can be born.
“How can that be?” you may ask. “How can the smoke hurt the child in the protected environment inside its mother?”
HOW THE UNBORN ARE HURT
Almost immediately after inhaling, nicotine from the smoke enters the smoking mother’s bloodstream. This powerful drug constricts the blood vessels and arteries in her uterus, thus depriving the baby of oxygen and nutrients. At the same time, carbon monoxide easily passes through the placenta to the baby. It replaces some of the vital oxygen in the baby’s blood that is needed for normal growth and development.
Of interest in this regard is a study made by English doctors at Oxford University. They said that when its mother smokes, the baby can “be seen to gasp in the womb, . . . almost certainly suffering a temporary oxygen shortage.”
The sad results are well documented. “Smoking during pregnancy can cause congenital malformations so severe that either the fetus dies, or the infant does shortly after birth,” Family Health magazine observes. Babies born of smoking mothers face a third higher risk of dying soon after birth. And they are twice as likely to be smaller than normal at birth.
In addition, the likelihood of “crib death” (sudden infant death syndrome) is increased when mothers smoke—by 52 percent researchers say. Apparently babies born to mothers who smoke have subtle abnormalities in their brain stem, and this may interfere with breathing and lead to sudden death.
If smoking by its mother can hurt an unborn baby, how is a child affected by the smoke after it is born?
EFFECT ON YOUNG CHILDREN
Actually, parents who smoke are indirectly forcing their children to smoke. “The effect on young children of parental smoking is estimated at about the same as if the child smoked three to five cigarettes a day,” explained lung specialist Dr. Alfred Munzer. And for the sensitive lungs of a young child, that is a lot of poison! Surely, as a parent, you would be very unhappy to learn that someone was making your child smoke five cigarettes a day!
But are children really hurt by the smoke of smoking parents? The Journal of the American Medical Association summarized the medical research on this question, saying:
“Infants whose mothers smoke are more likely to be admitted to hospitals with bronchitis or pneumonia than are infants whose mothers do not smoke. Another study showed that the chances of pneumonia or bronchitis developing in an infant are almost doubled if both parents smoke. . . . Other studies showed that the frequency of respiratory symptoms in children is directly proportional to the amount of tobacco smoke in the child’s environment. Also, children exposed to tobacco smoke have increases in heart rate and blood pressure that are similar to those changes that occur in smokers.”
A smoker may, for the pleasure he feels he derives from smoking, choose to damage his own health. But do you consider it morally right that he also damages the health of his children?
EFFECT ON ADULTS
What if you are a nonsmoking adult? Are you harmed by the smoke of others?
When you sit near a person who is smoking, the effect can be almost the same as though you were smoking. “Studies have shown,” noted Today’s Health, “that since the average smoker actively smokes his cigarette for only a small portion of the time it is lit, a nonsmoker may actually be forced against his will to breathe almost as much carbon monoxide, tar and nicotine as the active smoker sitting next to him.”
Dr. John L. Pool commented regarding the effect of only a slight increase of carbon monoxide in the air. He said that when carbon monoxide levels are “above eight parts per million (clean air has one to four), there is a definite decrease in oxygen reaching heart and lungs.” How much carbon monoxide may there be in the air of a smoke-filled room?
Philip Abelson, as editor of Science, wrote in an editorial of that magazine: “In a poorly ventilated, smoke-filled room, concentrations of carbon monoxide can easily reach several hundred parts per million, thus exposing smokers and nonsmokers present to a toxic hazard.” Such levels of carbon monoxide are far above the legal limits permitted.
Yet can this smoke really harm you? Indeed it can! Perhaps breathing the smoke makes you feel sick. Smokers should not be surprised by this, since, when smoking for the first time, many of them became sick, even vomiting.
The fact is, for persons with heart disease, breathing the air in a smoke-filled room can be dangerous. “It is a definite health hazard.” That was the conclusion reached from a federal study directed by Dr. Wilbert S. Aronow in California.
A more recent study of 2,100 middle-aged men and women reveals that even healthy adults are harmed when they are forced regularly to breathe the smoke of others. These nonsmokers were found to suffer the same kind of damage to small airways deep inside the lungs as do smokers. “This is permanent damage occurring in people who have chosen not to smoke,” explained physiologist James R. White.
Further emphasizing the danger of being forced to breathe tobacco smoke is a study in Erie County, Pennsylvania. According to the New York Times, this study “revealed that the nonsmoking wives of men who smoke die on the average four years younger than women whose husbands are also nonsmokers.”
WHAT THE EVIDENCE SHOWS
The evidence is conclusive: If you are a nonsmoker who must breathe the smoke of others, it can hurt you. As time goes on, this is becoming a generally recognized fact. Thus most states in the United States and hundreds of cities have some kind of ban on smoking in public facilities. Also, some companies restrict smoking to designated areas. And due to losses in productivity from smoking, a number of employers have offered employees bonuses of hundreds of dollars if they will quit.
Many lawsuits have been filed by nonsmokers in an effort to seek relief from the pollution caused by smokers. In one case, the judge noted that smoking had been banned in a certain company’s computer room because the equipment malfunctioned when exposed to cigarette smoke. So he ruled that, if smoking could be curtailed for a machine, it could be also for the sake of humans.
Some smokers now feel harassed because of such legislation against their habit. They consider it unjustified. As one said: “Smoking, after all, is not a sin.”
Yet is this really true, that it is not a sin? Can a person smoke and really please God and love his neighbor?
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POPULAR MAGAZINES PUSH TOBACCO USE
Most popular magazines today encourage tobacco use by filling their pages with advertisements that extol the pleasures of smoking. Rather than being exceptions, major women’s magazines are literally loaded with such advertisements.
Consider just one example, “Redbook” magazine of December 1980. Of its 180 pages, it has a total of 14 pages of cigarette advertisements. There are 11 full-page ads for 11 different brands of cigarettes, two half-page ads for another two brands of cigarettes and one double-page spread advertising yet another brand of cigarettes. But this is not unusual. Other women’s magazines devote similar space to pushing deadly tobacco.
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SMOKING DEPRIVES A DEVELOPING BABY OF OXYGEN AND NUTRIENTS NEEDED FOR NORMAL GROWTH
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SMOKING IS DAMAGING TO PEOPLE AS WELL