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Essay on Secondhand Smoke: The Unwilling Participants
In the 1950's and 60's scientists gave the people a lot of evidence on the deadly effects of smoking where the tobacco companies on the other hand tried to put the doubt in people’s minds through the campaigns to show that it is not all true. By the time people actually decided to take care of their health and finally saw how life-threatening smoking could be by real life examples, the tobacco companies already got rich from its sales (Gecker, 2003).
Nowadays, nobody doubts that “firsthand” smoke is deadly to your health and it causes lung cancer and heart disease in adults and asthma and bronchitis in children. Now the industry is onto the secondhand smoke. Scientists and researchers are representing a lot of evidence and research that has been done throughout the years showing that the secondhand smoke can also cause a lung cancer in nonsmokers.
Second-hand smoke ranks third as a major preventable cause of death behind only active smoking and alcohol. Second-hand smoke is the smoke that individuals breathe when they are located in the same air space as smokers (Lori, 1996). Second-hand smoke is a mixture of exhaled mainstream smoke from the tobacco user, sidestream smoke emitted from the smoldering tobacco between puffs, contaminants emitted into the air during the puff, and contaminants that diffuse through the cigarette
Secondhand smoke is a mixture of the smoke given off by the burning end of a cigarette, pipe, or cigar, and the smoke exhaled from the lungs of smokers. This mixture contains more than 4,000 substances, more than 40 of which are known to cause cancer in humans or animals and many of which are strong irritants. Secondhand smoke is also called environmental tobacco smoke (ETS); exposure to secondhand smoke is called involuntary smoking, or passive smoking. Everybody knows how smoking affects the smoker, but there is a growing body of scientific and medical evidence that shows just how harmful secondhand smoke really is.....
