Ban smoking in cars for children’s health?
A report has made recommendations regarding how to protect children from the effects of passive smoking.
A recent study by the Tobacco Advisory Group of the Royal College of Physicians has highlighted the health effects adult smoking has on children and has called for smoking in cars to be banned in an effort to cut down the risks associated with it.
According to the report, Passive smoking and children, around 2 million children in the UK live in households where they are exposed to cigarette smoke – and 90% of these are more likely to become smokers themselves if their parents smoke.
Costing the NHS around £23.3 million every year, some of the child health damages attributable to passive smoking include 22,000 new cases of wheeze and asthma and 200 cases of bacterial meningitis. It also accounts for one in five of all cases of sudden infant death syndrome – 40 every year.
One of the recommendations of the report is to widen the smoke-free law to include in particular smoking within cars and other vehicles.
Professor Terence Stephenson, President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), said: “The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has recently led on the call to ban smoking in cars with children travelling in them. We should be making cars totally smoke-free if there are children travelling in them. Second-hand smoke has been found to be strongly linked to chest infections in children, asthma, ear problems and sudden infant death syndrome, or cot death.
“We strongly support the policy recommendations in this new report and repeat the call for new approaches to address this problem so that we protect the health of children and young people.”
Other recommendations include promoting smoke-free homes in the media; increasing the price of tobacco; and protecting children from both smoking and smoke.
Professor John Britton, Chair of the RCP Tobacco Advisory Group, concluded: “This report isn’t just about protecting children from passive smoking, it’s about taking smoking completely out of children’s lives.”
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Parents know best
I’m afraid that the proposal to ban smoking in cars occupied by children represents an
March 24th, 2010 at 3:29 pmunwarranted intrusion into the privacy and autonomy of parenthood. The autonomy to
make one’s own decision about risks to subject a child to is not to be interfered with lightly.
It should only be done in cases where there is a substantial threat of severe harm
to the child. Interfering with parental autonomy in a case where there is only minor
risk involved is unwarranted.
More ill informed smoker bashing. I do not think the authors would argue with me that smoking over the last 60 years smoking has more than halved (UK 1948 66% of the population, 2009 22.5%) but asthma has risen by 300% (again in the UK). So smoking is not the primary cause of asthma and atopy, I assume the doctor’s cars and industrial pollution. The inconvenient truth is that the only studies of children of smokers suggest it is PROTECTIVE in contracting atopy in the first place. The New Zealand study says by a staggering factor of 82%.
“Participants with atopic parents were also less likely to have positive SPTs between ages 13 and 32 years if they smoked themselves (OR=0.18), and this reduction in risk remained significant after adjusting for confounders.
The authors write: “We found that children who were exposed to parental smoking and those who took up cigarette smoking themselves had a lower incidence of atopy to a range of common inhaled allergens.
“These associations were found only in those with a parental history of asthma or hay fever.”
They conclude: Our findings suggest that preventing allergic sensitization is not one of them.”
http://www.medwire-news.md/…/…gic_sensitization_.html
This is a Swedish study.
“Children of mothers who smoked at least 15 cigarettes a day tended to have lower odds for suffering from allergic rhino-conjunctivitis, allergic asthma, atopic eczema and food allergy, compared to children of mothers who had never smoked (ORs 0.6-0.7)
CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrates an association between current exposure to tobacco smoke and a low risk for atopic disorders in smokers themselves and a similar tendency in their children.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubm…pubmed/ 11422156
In conclusion let’s have a balanced debate and not characterise smokers as race akin to the devil.
March 24th, 2010 at 10:34 pm