Should you be worried about “third-hand” smoke?

I really don’t know what to make of this recent report about “3^rd-hand smoke”, which refers to the residues of the well-known toxins in tobacco smoke that are apparently left on exposed surfaces after someone has been smoking in the vicinity, not to mention that 3^rd-hand smoke also lingers on the bodies of the individuals who have been smoking.

According to this report in the prestigious journal, Pediatrics, 3^rd-hand smoke is something few of us are aware of even though it constitutes a real danger to the health of individuals, especially to the health of kids, who come in contact with these 3^rd-hand smoking residues, meaning ultimately, according to the authors of the report, that kids are at risk from smoking even when the parent only smokes outside or in specific rooms into which the kids are not allowed.

I guess this is meant to be a warning for all those parents who smoke only outside the house that “hey, you’re still damaging the kids even if you don’t smoke directly in their presence” (apparently, in focus groups, these researchers claim that many parents told them that smoking away from the kids could not possibly do any harm to the kids), but then it becomes important to ask just how solid is the evidence linking 3^rd-hand smoke with deleterious health outcomes, and there, I’m afraid, the answer is that it depends on what you mean by “solid”.

Sure, studies have linked high levels of such toxins with carcinogenic potential in animals, but as far as I can detect, no one has shown that a similar effect to occur in humans, that is, no study I know of has linked 3^rd-hand smoke exposure with a higher risk of cancer, although admittedly, it would be a pretty hard study to carry out.

What bothers me, I guess, is that we already have so much data linking smoking with terrible health consequences, both in its direct negative effects on the smoker and its undoubted negative effects via 2^nd-hand smoke intake, not to mention the terrible consequence – in the case of parents – that the kids of parents who smoke are much, much more likely to become smokers themselves than kids brought up in non-smoking households.

Thus, it seems to me most parents already know they shouldn’t be smoking if they want their kids to be as healthy as the kids have the right to be, and we really don’t need to hype – as this study has surely done with all the headlines it garnered – a much more debatable negative effect of smoking, for fear of just turning people off the crucial message about the need to stop smoking.