|
|
 |
Even if you don’t smoke, you smoke if you’re around smokers. You’re breathing in the same toxic stew of harmful chemicals as the smokers around you. Tobacco smoke contains thousands of dangerous elements and chemical compounds, including formaldehyde, arsenic, cadmium, benzene, polonium, ammonia, carbon monoxide, methanol and hydrogen cyanide.
Secondhand smoke has been proven to cause numerous health problems ranging from heart disease to emphysema, stroke, SIDS and cancer. Children are particularily susceptible to the health risks of secondhand smoke. In a 2006 report, The Health Consequences of Involuntary Exposure to Tobacco Smoke, the Surgeon General concluded that "smoking is the single greatest avoidable cause of disease and death." The impact in North Dakota causes 910 deaths each year.
There is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke. Therefore, policies that seek to find a "compromise" such as separately ventilated areas only continue to expose people to these dangerous toxins. However, implementing comprehensive smoke-free policies is effective at eliminating tobacco-related air pollution and saving lives:
- Fargo's smoke-free law reduced air pollution in bars by 98%.
- Smoke-free laws in Pueblo, CO reduced heart attack hospitalizations by 41%.
|
Dangers of Tobacco Use
Many people think that there are no effects of tobacco use on their bodies until they reach middle age. Smoking-caused lung cancer, other cancers, heart disease, and stroke typically do not occur until years after a person's first cigarette. However, there are many serious harms from smoking that occur much sooner. In fact, smoking has numerous immediate health effects on the brain and on the respiratory, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, immune and metabolic systems. While these immediate effects do not all produce noticeable symptoms, most begin to damage the body with the first cigarette – sometimes irreversibly – and rapidly produce serious medical conditions and health consequences.
|
See these websites for more information
American Lung Association (link)
Find out how smoke harms the lungs of smokers and those around them.
Center for Disease Control (link)
Information on the dangers of tobacco use and secondhand smoke.
Documents
Secondhand Smoke Fact Sheet
File Size: 29.82 kb
Facts on the harmful effects of secondhand smoke.
|
|
