Another Reason to Quit

You’re on a business trip and check in to a hotel. Upon entering your hotel room, there’s a distinctive odor in the air that you immediately recognize: cigarette smoke. No one is in the room smoking – at least no one that you can see after looking around – but you know that whoever was in the room was really puff, puff, puffing away. When you walk out of the room to check out the hotel’s swimming pool, despite being in the room for less than 30 minutes, all you can smell on your clothes is that musty smell, that dank odor that attaches itself to anything and everything it comes in contact with.

Sound familiar?

We all know about second-hand smoke and the risks involved for those who breathe in the fumes of those smoking around us. But researchers have become interested in so-called “third-hand smoking,” which is basically the aforementioned example: breathing in smoke from someone who has left but their foul air stayed.

This “third-hand” smoke is something researchers from the children’s wing of Boston’s Mass General Hospital coined. It’s appropriate, too, because instead of getting the toxic air from someone, you’re getting the toxic air from some thing, like draperies, furniture or carpeting.

Speaking of carpeting, this is something researchers were particularly concerned about in the course of their study. Toddlers and children of crawling age spend much of their time in proximity to the floor, and because dust particles are in abundant supply down by the feet (I often sneeze when bending down to touch the floor when I stretch in the morning) they can ingest some seriously dangerous toxins produced by cigarettes, many of which are carcinogenic (11 of the particles tested were carcinogenic).

I’m sure your toddler at one point or another has crawled on the floor of an apartment or home where cigarette smoking was pretty commonplace. If so, they likely breathed in trace amounts of carbon monoxide, chemicals used in paint thinners, weaponry production, even the stuff that killed that Soviet spy back in 2006 (called polonium-210). These particles and more researchers plied off of furniture and carpeting in their study, which is published in the journal Pediatrics.

I don’t have any patience or tolerance for people who smoke, mainly because it harms people who are totally innocent and who ought to be able to breathe in air that’s not muddied by smoking. Let’s hope this report serves as another incentive for people to quit, as the tentacles with which cigarette smoke affects people’s lives extend farther and farther.