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Fast progress is made on secondhand smoke

3 min read

Gather up a bunch of newspaper journalists who cut their teeth in the days when teletype machines and red pencils were still everyday tools of the trade, and you’ll inevitably hear them wax rhapsodic about the cigarette smoke that hung like a pall over newsrooms, particularly when deadlines were looming and adrenaline started flowing.

The same story could be told by the wait staff of restaurants, laborers at construction sites and just about any location where people punched a time clock.

As we’ve been reminded by “Mad Men,” the soon-to-be-concluded television drama about hard-living New York advertising agency staffers in the 1960s, smoking was once an ordinary, accepted practice. Large numbers of adults lit up, anywhere and everywhere, happily oblivious to the impact it had on their own health, the health of their children or its impact on anyone else around them.

To paraphrase the Virginia Slims ad from that era, we’ve come a long way, baby.

There is a blessedly greater awareness on how deadly smoking can be, and rates of tobacco use have been steadily declining over the last 50 years.

A study released last year by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found only about 18 percent of Americans still smoked.

Still, smoking is the culprit in close to 500,000 American deaths every year and millions are hobbled by diseases resulting from the habit.

It’s also estimated that somewhere around 41,000 Americans die each year as a result of secondhand smoke exposure. Four-hundred of those deaths are the result of sudden infant death syndrome.

But those numbers should start falling in the years ahead, because, according to a new study from the CDC, the degree to which Americans are exposed to secondhand smoke has fallen precipitously.

The study found that between 2000 and 2012, the number of nonsmokers in America subjected to secondhand smoke tumbled from 53 percent to just 25 percent.

The reduced number of smokers has certainly helped, but efforts by municipalities to restrict smoking in restaurants, bars, workplaces and other public places have played a pronounced role, and more smokers are stepping outside when they need a nicotine fix at home.

The study isn’t all rainbows and blooming flowers, however. It found that one of the groups that endured the highest rates of exposure was children, with 40 percent of those aged 3 to 11 still breathing in the toxic chemicals that escape with every puff.

Close to 70 percent of African-American children in that age group are exposed to secondhand smoke. All told, a full 58 million Americans still have to breathe in someone else’s cigarette smoke in the course of their daily lives.

Tom Frieden, the director of the CDC, explained that “secondhand smoke can kill. Too many Americans, and especially too many American children, are still exposed to it. That 40 percent of children – including 7 in 10 black children – are still exposed shows how much more we have to do to protect everyone from this preventable health hazard.”

Nevertheless, a great deal of progress has been made in a very short time.

Maybe, around 2065, when our own milieu becomes grist for the dramatic mill, like “Mad Men” is right now for us, viewers will wonder why anyone in our time was willing to put up with those little carcinogenic clouds floating around them.

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