The Real Deal Second-Hand Smoke?

• Here's a scary fact: more of North Carolina's 12th graders smoke than adults!! 26% of adults in N.C. smoke cigarettes, while 33% of 12th graders in N.C. smoke!
• Secondhand smoke (also called environmental tobacco smoke) is the cigarette smoke that nonsmokers breathe.  It includes smoke that comes directly from the burning cigarette, as well as smoke exhaled by the smoker.
• Secondhand smoke kills 65,000 people in the United States every year!
• The Environmental Protection Agency has classified secondhand smoke as a Class A carcinogen.  This means that breathing secondhand smoke causes cancer in humans.  Don't let anyone tell you that secondhand smoke won't hurt you.  The EPA also found that secondhand smoke causes an additional 3,000 lung cancer deaths in the United States each year!  It's the third most common cause of lung cancer (after active smoking and indoor radon).  
• That's not all.  Women exposed to secondhand smoke have a 91% higher risk of heart attack than women who aren't breathing in that deadly smoke.
• Exposure to secondhand smoke is a health threat to your younger brothers and sisters, too.  It is responsible for 150,000 to 300,000 serious respiratory ailments each year in children and infants, including bronchitis, ear infections, and pneumonia.
• Up to 26,000 children are diagnosed with asthma every year in the U.S. because their mother smoked at least 10 cigarettes a day.
• Because the organic material in tobacco doesn't burn completely, cigarette smoke contains more than 5,000 chemical compounds, including carbon monoxide, ammonia, formaldehyde, and even arsenic (rat poison)!  For more information on what's in cigarette smoke, check out the Cigarette Ingredients page.
• Secondhand smoke is recognized as enough of a danger that the National Restaurant Association's lawyers warn its members that if they allow smoking in their restaurants, they may be legally liable if an employee develops an illness from breathing all the secondhand smoke.