Breathing Other People’s Smoke

Abstract

The danger to health engendered by cigarette smoking has received a great deal of attention in the past two decades, and a wide variety of major and minor diseases has been shown to be caused by, or associated with, the habit. Many non-smokers are also exposed to cigarette smoke in the ambient air, produced by other people smoking at home, at work, on public transport, and in public places. Breathing smoke under those circumstances has been termed “passive” or “involuntary” smoking. Over the past few years there has been an upsurge of interest in the possible adverse effects on health of passive smoking, and the anti-smoking groups have attempted to make use of reports of such effects to further their cause. Although the possibility of damage to health is a legitimate cause for concern, the evidence that otherwise healthy people can be seriously adversely affected by passive smoking is not very strong. In this paper some of the health consequences of active and passive smoking are reviewed and the difficulties in studying the effects of passive smoking are examined.