Harmful Effects Of Second Hand Smoke example essay topic

According to Global Smoking Statistics, 80,000 and 100,000 youths start smoking everyday. Smoking is everywhere, in shops, restaurants and malls. Smoking can be controlled if the right steps are taken. If you walked around downtown Fort Collins, the odds are good that you will encounter a smoker. The negative effects of smoking outweigh the positive effects of smoking yet people still do it. There are ways to quit that can make your life better if you smoke.

Smoking goes back to 1492 when Christopher Columbus first stepped onto the plains of the new world. Native Americans chewed and inhaled a specific type of leaf, using a " " pipe to inhale the foreign leaf. It soon became a treasure for the Europeans, after Christopher discovered this new creation. Cigarettes did not become popular until the 1880's, nor were they available. People just used pipes and cigars. When, according to Smoking, James B. Duke developed a way to mass produce cigarettes, making them cheaper and milder.

This created an increase in popularity and between 1870 and 1890 the usage increased 100 times what is was before. The health risks of smoking are that it causes Lung cancer and in 1992 there were 161,000 new cases of lung cancer and 143,000 deaths according to Tobacco and Smoking, 1998. The duration and amount smoked determines the risk of getting lung cancer. Men or women who smoke forty cigarettes a day, compared to those who smoke twenty a day, have twice the risk as getting lung cancer. Those who start smoking before 15 are four times more likely to get lung cancer than those who begin after twenty-five. It also causes Cardiovascular Disease.

Smokers, male and female, are at a higher risk to get recurrent heart attacks, sudden death from coronary heart disease and myocardial infection than nonsmokers. The increase is two to four times the amount than nonsmokers. Cigarettes cause an addiction. Nicotine is a highly addictive drug. It is the nicotine that is in tobacco that makes cigarettes so addicting.

A 1991 editorial in the Lancet, from the book Tobacco and Smoking on page 33 says: The core of the problem lies in the addictive ness of nicotine. It is nicotine that people cannot easily do without, not tobacco; it is nicotine dependence that slows the progress of existing programmes. As a drug deliver system the modern cigarette is a highly effective device for getting nicotine to the brain, but by pharmaceutical standards it is also a very dirty one, the nicotine being contaminated with the nitrosamine's and other carcinogens in the tar, as well as with carbon monoxide and other harmful gases. Just taking nicotine out of cigarettes would not make them safe, it would just make them non-addictive. New smokers would not become addicted to cigarettes and smokers might stop smoking altogether. The health risks of smoking to include Lung disease.

According to smoking lungs. com, lung cancer is the number one cause of cancer deaths in men and women, while 90% of lung cancer is preventable. There are 2,000 cancer causing materials in a single cigarette. Second hand smoke can cause lung disease but is not as prevalent as smoking straight from the cigarette and still exists. Smoking causes many visual effects including bad breath, yellowed teeth and the smell of smoke lingering around the smoker. Second hand smoke is also a known cause of deaths in nonsmokers. web clams that "2/3 thirds of cigarette smoke is not inhaled by the user, so that goes to the people around them breathing it.

It also has twice the tar and nicotine as the person smoking it". According to the Canadian Cancer Society, "Cigarettes burn for approximately 12 minutes, but smokers usually only inhale for 30 seconds. As a result, cigarettes are spewing second-hand smoke (side stream) smoke into the air for non-smokers to breathe". Are health risks really accurate? According to Smoking, the "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the source of this statistic, over four hundred thousand deaths "are known to be cause by or associated with smoking in adults" (forces. org). "Associated with" simply means "occurs together with".

Thus the CDC figure incorporated many deaths that were not necessarily caused by smoking. This means that a person who is overweight, has diabetics and a history of heart attacks and dies from smoking, the CDC claims the death to smoking. In Smoking, he claims that "smoking is a bad habit, not an addiction. Individuals make a conscious choice to smoke or not to smoke". Although nicotine is proven to be and addictive drug, he claims that it is not the nicotine that causes the habit it is the person's choice.

If done properly with the right hygiene, bad breath and yellow teeth can be prevented. A smoker needs to brush their teeth regularly and floss. Use mouthwash and if you can find the specific brand proven to control the smoke smell, then use it. Second-hand smoke is not all its made out to be. According to Tobacco and Smoking, the EPA was able to claim only a weak association between second-hand smoke and lung cancer. The risk increase is as low as nineteen percent, which make it difficult to rule out other possibilities of death.

Faulty studies can also be linked to false information. When comparing nonsmokers who lived with a smoker, to those who were nonsmokers living with nonsmokers, lung cancer was a bit more common, but in only six of the thirty cases, the results were significant statistically. That might be the luck of the draw that the control group had a significant difference. According to Jake Sull um in "The harmful effects of Second hand Smoke are exaggerated,"By convention, epidemiologists call a result significant when the probability that it occurred purely by chance is five percent or less. By this standard, eighty percent of the studies discussed by the EPA did not find a statistically significant link between second hand smoke and lung cancer". The goals of EPA tests are to shade the truth from the public.

By making smoking seem like it is a high risk problem, people might be deterred from it. There are many health risks associated with smoking that cannot be proven to be not true. Even if studies are faulty, there are still a great number of people who die from smoking. No study is going to be accurate, studies are just a broad number trying to inform people about the topic, in this case about the harmful effects of the person smoking and person inhaling it. The visual appearance is hard to keep covered. Even with proper oral hygiene, the bad breath come from the lungs, where the tar hides and can never be cleaned, so they will always have bad breath, no matter how good they clean.

Tar deposits on your teeth and becomes hard and expensive to get rid of if possible at all. Second hand smoke is just as deadly as main stream smoke. It is linked to many illnesses in nonsmokers. It is like breathing the cigarette without the filter on it, all 4,000 ingredients still going into the person lungs.

No matter how it is refuted, second hand smoke has all the ingredients as mainstream smoke and is just as deadly. Smoking is everywhere and will continue to be all around us. We can ignore it or take action. One less person smoking means that there is that much less smoke in the air. With all the new smokers, a plan has to be set in place, either creating more ads or finding accurate facts. Unless smoking dissolves from the face of the earth, there will still be people "killing themselves".

Since smoking causes lung cancer, bad after effects and other problems, the need for elimination is even higher. If you smoke than you probably know it is hard to quit, but with the right resources and the motivation to quit, the United States will be a more "breathable" place to live. Citations Anonymous. More about second hand smoke. 2004.11/02/04... Anonymous.

Secondhand Smoke. 2004.11/02/04... Anonymous. Tobacco and Smoking. Ed. Bruno Leone.

San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, Inc., 1998. Grannies, MD, Frederic W... The Lung Cancer and Cigarette Smoking Web Page. 2004.10/28/04... Martin, Terry. Global Smoking Statistics.

About. com. 2002.11/01/04... Torr, James D. Smoking. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, Inc., 2001.