Hello everyone! As seen in the previous post, I was focusing on air pollution and its consequence to hair growth, henceforth for this blog post, I will be sharing the issues of indoor air pollution with regards to specifically, the problem of second-hand smoke.
Second-hand smoke is something which exhaled from a smoker’s lungs or from his/her cigarette. Can you imagine spending few minutes in a room with someone smoking indoors? I can’t.
https://www.cigna.com.hk/en/smarthealth/say-no-to-secondhand-smoke
Indoor air pollution with harmful Particulate Matter (PM) is mainly caused by cigarette smoke or second-hand smoke. The use of tobacco have killed about 100 million people in the last century. It is estimated that tobacco related deaths will increase to 1 billion in the 21st century if the smoking behaviour remains. About 80% of the 1.3 billion tobacco users worldwide live in low- and middle-income countries, where the burden of tobacco-related illness and death is heaviest (WHO). Super-slim-size-cigarettes SSL are considered a less harmful alternative to King-Size-Cigarette KSC due to longer filters and relatively low contents (Kant et al., 2016).
Second-hand smoke is the smoke that fills enclosed spaces when people burn tobacco products such as cigarettes, bidis and water-pipes (WHO). There is no safe level of exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke, which causes more than 1.2 million premature deaths per year and serious cardiovascular and respiratory diseases (WHO).
The main consequences of smoking are often well known as seen on the cigarette packaging. The question of PM recently came out in the past few years. PM contains extremely small particles or dusts found in the air and may have an extremely detrimental health effects on humans. For example, PM can cause premature death. Cardiovascular damage, decreased lung function and respiratory infections and diseases. Studies found that the smaller the PM, the more damaging are the effects on health. Due to this, “Combined Mainstream and Sidestream Smoke” (CMSS) is increasingly harmful to humans health, as cigarette smoke produces a large amount of PM (Kant et al., 2016).
However from the study, there are significant differences in PM concentrations between different types of cigarettes. The differences remain unclear, but based on the current study and previous studies, factors such as the content of tar, the type and length of cigarette and different additives may influence the PM emissions and its concentrations (Kant et al., 2016).
In conclusion, there is a greater need to further investigate the differences in PM concentration between different types of cigarettes and to understand why some cigarettes are more harmful for passive smokers.
Thank you for your time!
For the next blog post, I will be looking at the macro problem of air pollution specifically to the geographies of China as the home to one of the world’s most polluted cities.
Till next time!
References:
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tobacco
Kant, N., Müller, R., Braun, M., Gerber, A., & Groneberg, D. (2016). Particulate Matter in Second-Hand Smoke Emitted from Different Cigarette Sizes and Types of the Brand Vogue Mainly Smoked by Women. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 13(8), 799. doi:10.3390/ijerph13080799