Despite mounting global eff orts to control tobacco use, tobacco smoking remains a common addiction with over 1 billion smokers in the world—about 40% of men and 10% of women. As a result, exposure to secondhand smoke, a known cause of morbidity and premature mortality, is widespread, occurring wherever people spend time in the presence of smokers. In The Lancet, Mattias Öberg and colleagues pr...

BACKGROUND Exposure to second hand smoke (SHS) is one of the major causes of premature death and disease among children. While socioeconomic inequalities exist for adult smoking, such evidence is limited for SHS exposure in children. Thus, this study examined changes over time in socioeconomic inequalities in infants' SHS exposure in Japan. METHODS This is a repeated cross-sectional study of ...

The increasing evidence of the ill-health effects of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) has prompted the search for accurate measures of exposure to ETS. The present study examined whether it was possible to enhance the ability of questionnaire-derived assessments of ETS exposure, to predict salivary cotinine. Salivary samples were obtained from 258 nonsmoking bank employees, who simultaneously ...

Since the 1970s, we have known that second-hand smoke (SHS) makes children sick, but we have only recently begun to quantify tobacco-related ill health, and to monitor the effects of public health interventions. In this issue of the European Respiratory Journal, BEEN et al. [1] quantify, for the first time, the effects of smoke-free legislation on hospitalisations for paediatric respiratory inf...

Cigarette smoke contains harmful chemicals with hazardous adverse effects on almost every organ in the body of smokers as well as of nonsmokers exposed to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS). There has been increasing interest in the effects of passive smoking on the health of children. In order to detect the magnitude of passive smoking in children, parental questionnaires, measuring nicotine an...