The Lancet: Secondhand Smoke Kills About 1.7 Million People a Year
The international medical journal The Lancet published a study on Tuesday (September 8) reporting that more than 2.71 billion people worldwide are exposed to the hazards of secondhand smoke, of whom 767 million are children aged 14 or under. In 2023 secondhand smoke caused nearly 1.66 million premature deaths and a great deal of disease and healthy-life loss, with deaths from ischemic heart disease being the most numerous. In addition, in 2023 there were as many as 5.2 million childhood cases of respiratory infection attributable to secondhand-smoke exposure.
The report says that tobacco remains one of the world's major drivers of disease; in 2023 about 8 million people worldwide died of smoking-related diseases, many of them nonsmokers exposed to secondhand smoke. Many people think that as long as the amount of secondhand smoke inhaled is small, it does no serious harm. But the report states that "secondhand smoke is a globally recognized health risk, and there is no such thing as a safe level of inhalation."
The researchers, drawing on studies and population-survey data from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) biomedical database PubMed, estimated secondhand-smoke exposure across 204 countries and regions from 1990 to 2023 and quantified the resulting disease burden.
The report notes that although the global smoking rate has fallen significantly since 1990, population growth and rising numbers of people exposed to secondhand smoke in Africa and the Middle East mean that, overall, the number of people harmed by secondhand smoke has not yet fallen; women and children are especially severely affected.
Secondhand smoke is a mixture of sidestream smoke from the incomplete combustion of tobacco and the mainstream smoke exhaled by the smoker. Because combustion temperature is lower, sidestream smoke concentrates higher levels of toxic substances: carbon monoxide is five times that in mainstream smoke, nicotine three times, and the potent carcinogen nitrosamines as much as fifty times.
Secondhand smoke should be classified as a public nuisance seriously harming population health. Laws and regulations should be strengthened everywhere to ban smoking in public places, and public-health departments in every country should widely publicize the hazards of secondhand smoke, urging smokers to keep away from children, women, and the elderly even when smoking at home.
Smokers should also quit if at all possible; if they cannot, they should at least not smoke in public places or in shared family spaces. Secondhand smoke residue lingers on sofas, clothing, furniture, and walls, harming the family's health over the long term; so smokers are harming not only their own health but also, with their own hands, destroying the happiness of their families.
Each of us must bravely stand up and say no to secondhand smoke. We must break the illusion that "smoking is only a personal habit" and treat secondhand smoke as a serious public-health hazard and source of disease.