Laboratory Research

Passive Smoking

Passive, or involuntary smoking is just about as harmful to a persons health as directly smoking a cigarette or other tobacco product. Non-smokers breath in the sidestream smoke, which is the smoke coming off the burning tip of the cigarette, as well as the mainstream smoke, which is the smoke that the smoker inhales and exhales. For over two decades, the evidence on the harmful effects of passive smoking has been mounting. More recently however, reports from groups like the World Health Organization have identified passive smoking as a risk for a myriad of maladies and diseases.

Passive smoking has been linked to low birthweight in childbirth, as well as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS. In children, passive smoking is known to cause or worsen the effects of middle ear infections, asthma, bronchitis, and pneumonia. In fact, children exposed to passive smoke are admitted twice as often to hospitals for conditions like bronchitis and pneumonia. The ailments of passive smoking for adults resemble those of regular smokers' heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, and nasal cancer.

The tobacco industry has been denying the harmful effects of second-hand smoke. This is expected since an acknowledgement of that fact would not make much business sense. The tobacco industry rather sees the mounting evidence on the harmful effects of passive smoking to be a violation of a persons rights to smoke, for fear that his or her non-smoking peers may look unfavorably upon their actions. As a reactive attack, big tobacco has hired many scientists to lodge misleading information to confuse and spread doubts about the health risks of second hand smoking.

Philip Morris, in 1996, released a series of advertisements that compared the risk of lung cancer from passive smoking to everyday tasks like eating biscuits or drinking milk.

The premise of this advertising campaign was that the increased risk of developing lung cancer from passive smoking, which is around 20%, is trivial when compared to the risks linked to consuming foods high in saturated fat.

Eventually, these advertisements were withdrawn after the Advertising Standards Authority ruled that they were misleading, but by this time, Philip Morris had already accomplished what they set out to do -to add to the confusion and controversy of second hand smoke.