Your colleagues smoke can kill you

If you thought that someone else smoking a cigarette/bidi has nothing to do with you, its time that you rethink. Only 15 per cent of the smoke from a cigarette is actually inhaled by the smoker and the rest goes into the surrounding air which other people passively breathe in. This was revealed by Mr. Hemant Goswami of Burning Brain Society at a seminar on “The Joy of Smoke Free Public Places” at Chandigarh central library today.

Breathing air which contains tobacco smoke can be bad for your health because the tiny particles and gases in tobacco smoke contain over 4,000 chemicals, 200 of these chemicals are known poisons and at least 60 are known to cause cancer. The gases in second hand smoke includes; ammonia, arsenic, benzene, cadmium, carbon monoxide, chromium, DDT, formaldehyde, hydrogen cyanide, lead, nickel, N-nitrosamines, sulphur dioxide, vinyl chloride, carbon monoxide, etc. Many of these gases are the same which comes out of car exhaust and similar to pesticide residues. Though the second hand tobacco smoke contains most of the same chemicals as that smokers inhale but what’s alarming is that the concentration of most toxic and carcinogenic chemicals is much higher in second hand smoke due to which it has been identified as one of the leading source of toxic chemical exposure and number one environmental cause of cancer. These were some other startling facts shared in the seminar.

Mr. Hemant further revealed that wife and children of smokers and people working in areas where others smoke like restaurants, hotels, bars, etc. are at much higher risk of cardio vascular diseases, cancer, bronchitis, asthmas and other ailments. A smoker’s wife stands around 30% higher risk of getting a heart attack then that of a non-smoker. Similarly studies have found that waiters and bartenders working in restaurants have 50 to 150 percent higher chances of dying from hear attacks, lung cancer and for overall mortality even after taking into account the active use of smoking, alcohol and the socioeconomic status.

Next time when a colleague of yours smoke in the office, just recollect the fact that spending 8 hours in an office where people smoke is equivalent to smoking 6 cigarettes yourself and when you visit a smoky bar even for 2 hours it is equivalent of smoking 4 cigarettes.