Protect your family with a smoke-free home

Numerous scientific evidences have consistently shown that if a husband smokes in a family, in addition to respiratory cancers, the wife is 20% more likely to get cancer than a wife who has never been exposed to cigarette smoke. This rate is almost equivalent to the wife directly smoking, according to the assessment report of the International Agency for Research on Cancer, under the World Health Organization WHO.

Children affected by cigarette smoke will have poor development and suffer from many diseases. Illustration photo

Children are the most vulnerable group due topassive smoking. Children breathe faster than adults, so the amount of toxins inhaled from the outside environment is also higher. All studies on secondhand smoke show that secondhand smoke causes extremely serious health hazards, especially for children. Most children live in families where one parent smokes.cigaretteAll have the following symptoms: Susceptible to lung infections; often have symptoms of cough, wheezing or asthma; susceptible to ear diseases such as otitis media.

Cigarette smoke can spread throughout the house, not limited to certain areas, even when the windows are open. Therefore, if the family has a parent who smokes, passive smoking for children is inevitable, despite measures that are supposed to "protect children" such as smoking near a window, or in a separate room from the child's room.

Almost 85% of cigarette smoke is invisible, and it can linger in a room for up to 2.5 hours, even with windows open. Common methods, such as smoking outside a window or next to a fan, are ineffective in removing smoke from the home. Smoke can linger on carpets, furniture, and walls, which absorb the toxins in cigarette smoke and gradually release them back into the air, creating a risk of secondary exposure.

In enclosed spaces, tobacco smoke contamination cannot be removed by conventional cleaning methods or ventilation. Although the impact of this is still unclear, because children cannot control their behavior while playing and eating, it is easy for children to ingest food with high concentrations of tobacco smoke.

Nowadays, children spend most of their time indoors. However, children are not yet capable of recognizing the harmful effects of cigarette smoke on their bodies in order to protect themselves. As mentioned above, children breathe faster than adults, so the amount of toxins inhaled from the outside environment is also higher. Research shows that after exposure to cigarette smoke, the concentration of cotinine in children is 70% higher than that of adults (cotinine is a metabolite of nicotine in the body, used to assess exposure to cigarette smoke). There has been no research on the concentration of other toxic substances in children who are exposed to secondhand smoke, but this research is enough to sound the alarm about the potential serious impact of cigarette smoke on young children./.