By Vivek Dubey
CNBC-TV18.com
Published May 31, 2024
Even if you don’t smoke, inhaling second-hand smoke puts you at risk for serious health complications.
In the early 2000s, the tobacco industry downplayed the hazards of passive smoking, calling it a mere inconvenience.
The landscape has changed dramatically since then, with irrefutable evidence of the adverse health impact of second-hand smoke.
Second-hand smoke is a lethal mix of irritants, toxins, and cancer-causing substances released by active smokers.
Of the 7000 compounds released in second-hand smoke, at least 69 can cause cancer.
Toxic compounds from second-hand smoke cling to surfaces and remain in the room months after smoking took place.
This lingering residue, known as “third-hand smoke”, may be harmful to those exposed.
Each year, 8.7 million tobacco-related deaths occur, 1.3 million of which are among non-smokers exposed to second-hand smoke.
This is almost equivalent to the annual number of people that die in road traffic crashes.
Of the 1.3 million second-hand smoke-related deaths, almost 1.2 million occur in low-and middle-income countries.
These figures are from the Global Burden of Disease 2019 and the WHO report on the global tobacco epidemic, 2023.