One of the major addictions in today’s world is cigarette smoking. How does smoking effect the environment? The cigarette smoke contains over different 4000 chemicals, most of them are toxic. Some of them may be well known to you such as ammonia, arsenic, benzene, cadmium, formaldehyde, vinyl chloride, hydrogen cyanide, carbon monoxide.  They are highly toxic and 250 of those chemicals are the major cause of cancer in people who are exposed to passive smoking.

Let’s face it. Smoking is not only a great health hazard to the person who uses cigarettes but the smoker pollutes the air. What is worse, the people around the smoker must inhale the cigarettes air and are exposed to the same or even more danger the smoker himself. This is known as passive smoking or second hand smoking.

The dangers of passive smoking and effects on adults are enormous. But just imagine a child in a smoking household environment or in a car. Imagine what happens to a passive smoking baby…

1. Let’s get the facts about smoking and health effects of passive smoking on children.
2. Because babies and toddlers are still in developing stage, their lungs are prone to decreased lung function. They most likely will develop severe asthma and other respiratory tract infections such as cough, wheeze, bronchitis, pneumonia, breathlessness in general, and extensive phlegm production.
3. The children of smoking parents or caregivers are more susceptive to middle ear fluid buildup, which leads to a painful middle ear infection. The operations of the middle ear infection are the most widespread children operations. Also, frequent middle ear infections are the major cause of hearing loss in children.
4. Studies on sudden infant death syndrome, SIDS, have proven that in the most cases SIDS occurs due exposure of babies to secondhand smoke. SIDS is also the cause of the babies who were exposed whose mothers smoke DURING the pregnancy. Those babies are more likely to develop all sorts of health problems during their life to come.
5. It does not finish there. Mother who doesn’t smoke but is exposed to passive smoking during her pregnancy, might give birth to a baby with low-birth weight and the baby might suffer from the same symptoms as the babies whose mothers do smoke.
6. One more important fact. The children whose one or both parents smoke, take over the addiction.  One if five children becomes a regular cigarette user by the age of 15. The number is growing with the age.

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