Are adults who smoke putting children in their care at risk by exposing them to passive smoke?.
According to one report, mothers who smoke at least ten cigarettes per day, cause their children under five to have nicotine and other cancer causing chemicals in their bloodstream. (Buhle).
Blood tests showed that children with mothers who did not smoke and were not around any other regular smokers in the household had mean level of PAHs(polyaromatic hydrocarbons, implicated in causing cancer) of 0.15 femotoles/microgram. Children of mothers who did not smoke, but were sometimes around another regular smoker in the household had a mean level of 0.18. Children around mothers who smoked had a mean level of 0.35. The mothers were light smokers, averaging 10 cigarettes a day and none smoked as much as a pack a day.(Buhle).
The original purpose of this study was to identify markers in children's blood to be used to gauge the amount of smoke to which the children had been exposed. It is thought that this data will be useful later in long-term studies to see what dose of passive or second-hand smoke causes cancer in later life.(Perera).
Another study conducted by Ellis J. Nuefeld,M.d.,Ph.D., and his colleagues at Boston Children's Hospital, found that passive smoke can lower levels of the "good" cholesterol HDL. The .
children in the study were already at high risk because of high cholesterol, family history of heart disease or low HDL. The .
study included 103 children ranging in ages from two to eighteen. Twenty-seven percent of the children came from homes where someone smoked. Those exposed to tobacco smoke averaged ten percent lower levels of HDL in their bloodstreams.(Doctor's Guide) .
In June of 1994 a report was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Fontham) that analyzed data from 653 women with confirmed lung cancer and 1253 randomly selected female controls.
