Building sickness or a sick mind?
Sunday, June 20, 2010 "Research shows that those living in multiple-unit housing are being exposed to toxins from tobacco smoke," says Jonathan Winickoff, a pediatrician at Massachusetts General Hospital General Hospital for Children.
"Even if you are not a smoker and don't smoke inside of your own apartment, if you have a neighbor who is smoking inside of his, the entire building is contaminated."
Story HERE.
So, to recap, we have first-hand smoke (inhaled directly by smokers), second-hand smoke (exposure to gases and particles from other people's tobacco smoke, highly diluted - in most circumstances - by the air around us), third-hand smoke (exposure to minute particles of smoke in carpets and furnishings) and, now, fourth-hand smoke (exposure to "toxins" that you might not hitherto have been aware of because the source is to be found in a completely different part of the building in which you live!!).
I don't think anyone else has called this phenomenon fourth-hand smoke yet - but it's only a matter of time.
Reader Comments (7)
How about a competition Simon. Whoever comes up with the most ludicrous suggestion for fourth-hand smoke...wins a bottle of wine.
But the suggestion has to be faintly plausible.
And where do the toxins from vehicles go? They are far more widespread and a lot denser than tobacco smoke, never mind more harmful!
Isn't it just so convenient that as the majority of people use vehicles in one form or another, no-one is brave enough to put their head above the parapet and show proof that vehicles kill, in one way or another, far more people than smoking ever will!
The bad news on this is that it will get some mainstream media air and that a usually august body in the New England Journal Of Medicine publishes such junk science. The good news is that any reasonable person can see the emperor is stark naked and people just know how stupid the paper is.
Does anyone else, like me, hear a note of real desperation in some of the “smoking scare stories” to come out in recent years (notably the ones since the ban); and does anyone else, also like me, find that most other people simply haven’t heard about them? Some of them today really are just too outlandish for people to believe them – and the media know this, so they no longer give them the coverage that they did to those stalwart paper-sellers like “smoking causes cancer” or “passive smoking kills.” Most of the normal people I know don’t have the foggiest idea what “third hand smoke” is, let alone “fourth hand smoke” or whatever they’re going to start calling this. The similarity, too, of the term “third-hand smoke” to the highly successful term “second-hand smoke” has echoes of the re-hashing of an old idea. And old ideas only ever get re-hashed when there are no new ones around ……..
It also occurs to me that the more things the anti-smoking brigade start to include in their ever-widening cigarettes-have-made-this-lethal net, eventually they must come to the point where they'll be telling us, in effect (because it’ll be virtually impossible not to come into contact with something that has at some time been in at least remote contact with cigarette smoke), it’s no healthier to not smoke than it is to smoke!
Oh, how I love to see those I despite backing themselves neatly into a corner!
Whoops! Meant those I "despise" of course!
""Research shows that those living in multiple-unit housing are being exposed to toxins from tobacco smoke............."
Of course it does.
So ?
C'mon, Doc - make my day.....................................................
(I promise we'll keep a straight face this time).
Winickoff is the guy who coined third-hand smoke and admitted to me in an email it's just smell. I have his email address, if any of you want to contact him drop me a line and i'll pass on the details.