Passive smoking is also known as secondhand or involuntary smoking. It is basically the breathing in and exposure to other people's cigarette smoke, which is also known as secondhand smoke or Environmental tobacco smoke.
Environmental tobacco smoke is one of the biggest sources of indoor air pollution. As well as making your home or your workplace smell bad, it also, more importantly can lead to lung cancer and heart disease in smokers and in non-smokers.
Scientists have ranked indoor air pollution as one of the top five major environmental health risks that affect us today. This statistic is quite worrying as most people spend as much as 90% of their time indoors.
Babies and children are especially at risk and their health, as a child and even as an adult in years to come, is jeopardised if they are exposed to passive smoking at home.
Environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) is a product of two of the three types of tobacco smoke produced when a person smokes a cigarette.
The first type of smoke that makes up ETS is exhaled mainstream smoke. Exhaled mainstream smoke is the smoke that is first of all inhaled by the smoker upon taking a puff of a cigarette and then breathed out into the air from his lungs.
The second type of smoke that makes up ETS is called sidestream smoke. Sidestream smoke is the smoke that drifts upwards and into the air from the tip of a burning cigarette.
Finally, the third type of smoke that is produced on smoking a cigarette, but which does not make up ETS is mainstream smoke. This is the smoke that is inhaled by the smoker himself, through the cigarette and which stays inside the body.
Mainstream smoke and exhaled mainstream smoke are not the same, as they differ chemically. After inhaling cigarette smoke into the lungs, some of the smoke stays in the body, along with some of the chemical substances, whilst the rest is exhaled together with the remaining chemical substances.
The exhaled smoke undergoes several chemical changes upon coming into contact with enzymes from the tissues of the human body before being released into the air. Mainstream smoke is the smoke that stays inside the smoker's body and is not breathed out into the air.
Although the health risks that a passive smoker may occur are considerably less than those of an active smoker, secondhand smoke still contains many of the chemicals and carcinogenic compounds that are also breathed in by the active smoker.
Nevertheless the active smoker chooses to smoke himself, whilst the passive smoker is forced to do so against his will.
source : helpwithsmoking.com
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