Secondhand Smoke: How it Affects the Health of Others

Stephen E. Smith

IRN 9047136049

COM/150

02/10/2013
Tracey Fida

Smoking cigarettes is a habit many people have these days, and fortunately those numbers are going down. If compared with the 1940’s, the number of smokers had a huge decrease nowadays. Mendes (2011), “Gallup and Healthways find the national smoking rate stuck at 21%. Although this is much lower than the historic highs of around 40%, Gallup found from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, there remains significant variation across states, with smoking levels in many states still at 25% or higher. The number of Americans who smoke has fallen to 20 percent, tying the all-time low first recorded in 2009.” (8).
However, the health problems it brings to the smokers and their surroundings still a big concern and something people need to learn more about. Unfortunately, what some non-smoker does not realize is how bad that smoke is for them as it is for the smoker, the reason they are known as involuntary or passive smokers once they are breathing in the second hand smoke taking in the nicotine and toxic chemicals the same way smokers do. When a non-smoker sees somebody smoking a cigarette the first thing that crosses their minds is how bad that habit is, not juts because the harmful effects it causes to the smoker's health, but the odor impregnated in the clothes, the bad breath, and the smoke exhaled. Secondhand smoke (SHS), also known as Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS), is a combination of two types of smoke expelled from blazing tobacco: sidestream, which is the smoke from the lighted end of a cigarette, cigar, or pipe, and mainstream, which is the smoke expelled by a smoker. The sidestream smoke has a higher concentration of carcinogens and it has smaller particles