Author: James Anderson

Busted: 7 myths about smoking and cancer

As a parent, one of the best ways you can prevent secondhand smoke exposure for your child is to quit smoking yourself. This is a serious health concern that can affect both adults and children who are exposed to secondhand smoke. Firsthand smoking and secondhand smoke both cause serious health effects. While directly smoking is worse, the two have similar adverse health effects. Many of the participants argued that children are still developing, and are smaller and weaker than adults are, so secondhand smoke will have a greater effect on their health. Participants were very descriptive in discussing the importance of development.

For example, one participant stated, “I don’t think it causes as much harm as someone who smokes all the time, because we don’t do it because we want to. I don’t think there is as much harm as those who do it all the time” (P127 F). Some of those mutations may be harmless, but the more there are, the greater the risk that one or more will develop into cancer.

About Secondhand Smoke

Even these participants made unfavorable comments about secondhand smoke once the interviewer offered a definition. The aim of this qualitative study is to describe beliefs about secondhand smoke and its health affects held by Mexican and Central American immigrants in the United States. It uses an ethnomedicine framework in the analysis of in-depth interviews conducted with Latinx immigrants. Newspapers ran with the story, credulously assuming that the correlation had been truly caused by the smoking ban.

The first few transcripts were assigned to four team members for initial coding to ensure consistency across coders. Codes or tags were attached to relevant sections of the transcripts and discussed by all coders to develop a shared understanding of the codes. One person (who also conducted the interviews) coded all of the transcripts, with the coded transcripts randomly assigned to each of the other three coders for review and summary. Any discrepancies in coding were resolved through discussion by team members. All codes were attached to relevant text within each transcript. Atlas ti v7.0 (Scientific Software Development GMBH, Berlin, Germany) software was used for data management.

Smoking and Tobacco Use

1. Among the 76,000 study participants, however, only 4,000 reported no exposure to passive smoke, making it difficult to “tease out a difference” showing a connection, as one researcher said.
2. Yes, it’s more toxic for the one inhaling it than the one exhaling it.
3. “This is by every standard a public health law,” Groveman said.
4. The finding comports with existing literature suggesting that the effect is borderline and concentrated on long-term, high levels of exposure.

I think it’s more damaging to a child, because their bodies are very—or what can I say, their liver or organs are very small and weak, so I would imagine that it can be more damaging, right? To the kids than the—well, I mean, it’s also harmful for adults, but I think adults have already been damaged by what they’ve already smoked, but a small child with small organs can be affected more. It’s bad because, you know, the smoke even from a fire is bad, no secondhand smoke it’s because you’re expelling everything to the outside. One participant (P158 M) held that most members of the local Latinx community were not familiar or knowledgeable about secondhand smoke, with some confusing it with vehicle exhaust.

Tips to Protect Yourself from Unhealthy Air

Black Americans report greater secondhand smoke exposure than do Whites, Asians, or Latinos 6,10,11. However, nearly one-quarter (23.9%) of Mexican American nonsmokers were exposed to secondhand smoke 2. Of the participants who did not recognize the term secondhand smoke, most did not indicate it was a problem greater than primary smoking.

This latter point is accurate, and additional years of exposure and years for illness to develop are considered in the toxicological and developmental literature when referring to other toxicants 26. Although not developed by the participants, children’s developing system and faster metabolism also put them at greater health risk from exposure to toxicants, such as secondhand smoke. Most of the participants immediately volunteered a definition in recognizing the term secondhand smoke.

Cardiovascular diseases

The interviews indicate that this participant’s perception was incorrect. The bilingual study coordinator used a site-based strategy 23 to identify and recruit the potential study participants. Sites, such as community care clinics, stores, community partners, and churches, were used to contact this hard-to-reach population. Because interviewers worked through community partners, the number of potential participants who refused to participate is not known.

Nevertheless it’s been enough to launch a movement to ban smoking most everywhere. If I’m next to someone who smokes, then I get a bad headache. I don’t smoke, but the smoke is harmful for me. …That’s what I think.

While many states adopted comprehensive smokefree laws in the five years after the report, progress has all-but stalled with only one state, North Dakota, adopting a smokefree law in the past five years. We can’t wait 10 more years for the other 22 states to protect their citizens—not with 41,000 lives lost, and $5.6 billion in economic costs spent, each year. Including e-cigarettes in smokefree or tobacco-free policies can protect people who do not use e-cigarettes from exposure to e-cigarette emissions. It can also help change social norms about tobacco use. Despite the enactment of no-smoking laws, the only way to fully protect nonsmokers from secondhand smoke is smoking cessation. Given the numerous health effects of secondhand smoke, avoidance is increasingly being viewed as a human right.

An accurate understanding of community knowledge and beliefs about secondhand smoke is important for successful health and public health communication and practice 12. This understanding is especially important when the community includes immigrants who do not speak the dominant language and who have different life experiences. This is the case for many Latinx immigrants in the United States (US).

Participants were asked directly whether secondhand smoke was more dangerous for children than for adults. A few of the participants stated that secondhand smoke had the same effect on children and adults. This analysis uses an ethnomedicine approach 16 for understanding health beliefs about secondhand smoke. Ethnomedicine is the comparative study of how those who share culture view disease, how they prevent disease, and how they treat disease. The Explanatory Models of Illness framework developed by Kleinman 17,18 informs this analysis.