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Home › Articles › Toddler Health › Smoke Into the Mouths of Babes

Smoke Into the Mouths of Babes

The Effects of Secondhand Smoke on Babies and Toddlers

By Lisa A. Goldstein

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The next time you get your nicotine fix, you might want to consider that – depending on where you live – it could be grounds for a fine.

That's right. Starting January 1, Texas will restrict smoking in foster parents' homes at all times and in cars when children are present. States and counties including Vermont and Washington already prohibit foster parents from smoking around children in their homes and cars. In 2006, Arkansas and Louisiana passed laws forbidding anyone from smoking in cars carrying young children.

Courts and social welfare agencies are beginning to react and have issued thousands of orders prohibiting smoking in a car or home when a child is present, says Dr. Michael Rabinoff, a board certified psychiatrist and author of Ending the Tobacco Holocaust: How Big Tobacco Affects Our Health, Pocketbook and Political Freedom – And What We Can Do About It (Author's Publishing Cooperative, 2006).

Effects on Babies and Toddlers
Indeed, the war against smoking has an additional, focused mission: reducing secondhand smoke around babies and toddlers. There is a real risk to this demographic. According to the 2006 U.S. Surgeon General's Report, each year secondhand tobacco smoke is associated with an estimated 8,000 to 26,000 new asthma cases in children, an estimated 150,000 to 300,000 new cases of bronchitis and pneumonia in children younger than 18 months (7,500 to 15,000 of which will require hospitalization) and about 789,700 cases of middle ear infections in children.

In addition, Dr. Rabinoff reports, secondhand tobacco smoke increases the number of asthma attacks and severity of symptoms in 200,000 to one million children with asthma, and increases the risk for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).

"Compared with babies and toddlers whose mothers/parents don't smoke, children whose mothers/parents smoke have four times the rate of hospitalizations in the first year of life, increased rates of otitis, meningitis, neurobehavioral problems, fire-related injuries (cigarette smoking is the No. 1 cause of fatal fires) [and] risk of long-term health problems including a higher likelihood of becoming smokers themselves during their teen years, and of cardiovascular disease in adulthood," says Dr. Deborah Moss, a pediatrician and expert on the effects of secondhand smoke at the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh.


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