Second Hand Tobacco Smoke Kills Now

The final scientific research to establish the killing power of tobacco smoke had to wait for “natural” research opportunities. No one can design scientific research on the large scale effects of tobacco smoke on human beings (unethical and costs) .

Scientific research requires large numbers of participants, divided into never smoked and forced to smoke (control and treatment) groups.

For the last few years about 440,000 died in the US, with 11,000 in Missouri, each year, as the result of Big Tobacco marketing and addiction.

Then progressive communities passed clear air ordinances and watched the change in hospital admissions and deaths from heart attacks and strokes.

Addicted people paid for the cigarettes; no research costs. The lure of charismatic Big Tobacco brought in the “treatment” group; no ethical research decisions were needed.

Pueblo, Colorado, restrict smoking in 2002 with a three year study. A comparison of the number of heart attack hospital admissions before and after the law was passed showed a 27% decrease in the number of heart attacks.

A study, between 2007 to 2014 (published last year) in Indianapolis, Indiana, showed a 25% decrease in hospital admissions for acute heart attacks. “Among people who never smoked there was a 21% decrease in heart attacks.”

[Half way through the study, clean air was extended to bars because of the number of lives being saved during the first years. This is good public health practice.]

There is no safe level of tobacco smoke exposure. This includes third hand tobacco smoke from a smoker’s hair, clothes, and body.

Smokefree legislation saves lives. The stronger the law, the fewer hospitalizations and the lower the health care expenditures for a wide range of diseases. For maximum benefit there should be no exceptions in tobacco smoke exposure laws.

[Frequent exceptions have been prisons, hotel and motel rooms, and residential establishments such as long-term care institutions and rest homes!!! These are all places where there is no need for the effect tobacco smoke has on intensifying many illnesses.] 

Second and third hand tobacco smoke not only kill but kill now; any time that a blood clot is caught in the brain or the heart. That includes memory care residents.