“If you can smell it, you’re breathing in those cancer-causing chemicals, and 90 percent of the smoke you smell in a room is the most dangerous type of cigarette smoke,” explained Kim Winter, manager of the Tobacco Control Program at the American Lung Association of Connecticut. “That ‘side-stream smoke’ comes off the burning end of the cigarette and burns at a lower temperature than when someone takes a drag. That cigarette is constantly putting those chemicals into the air for the five to 10 minutes the cigarette is lit.”

Side-stream smoke has five times the amount of carbon monoxide as the smoke the smoker inhales, according to the ALA. Carbon monoxide decreases the body’s ability to carry oxygen to tissues. Side-stream smoke also contains three times the amount of benzo(a)pyrene, a known carcinogen, and 50 times the amount of ammonia, a respiratory irritant.

“In the United States per year, there are between 30,000 and 60,000 deaths of healthy nonsmokers attributed to ETS,” said Beverly Kingsley, epidemiologist at the Office on Smoking and Health at the CDC. “If exposure to second-hand smoke causes lung cancer and heart disease in adults, do you honestly think children are any more resilient? We will probably have evidence in 10 years that ETS causes the same in children.”

There are also plenty of statistics about other respiratory or lung ailments ETS causes.

“The [Environmental Protection Agency] attributes thousands of new cases of childhood asthma to second-hand smoke,” Winter said. “Additional episodes of increased severity in asthmatic children are worsened by environmental smoke, estimated to account for somewhere between 200,000 and 1 million cases per year.”

“The only strategy is to avoid, avoid, avoid,” Kingsley said. “Don’t sit in any restaurant where there is a nonsmoking section in the same room as a smoking section. It’s just like trying to swim in the nonchlorinated section of the swimming pool.”

What You Can Do
Keep your home smoke-free, even if you are a smoker.

Avoid restaurants and public buildings where smoking is allowed.

Make it known to the management that a smokeless environment is preferred.

Never expose children to second-hand smoke. If you can smell it on your child’s clothing, he or she has already inhaled it.

Cigars and pipe smoke should also be avoided.

The researchers, led by Doctor, identified strokes that occurred in the 1.1 million female members of the California Kaiser Permanente Medical Program between the ages of 15 to 44 years old. The researchers considered both types of stroke: ischemic stroke, in which there is decreased blood flow to the brain due to a clot or narrowed artery; and hemorrhagic stroke, in which there is bleeding into the brain tissues due to a ruptured blood vessel or an aneurism.

The incidence of stroke identified in this population was a very low 11.3 per 100,000 woman-years. 295 women with stroke were randomly matched with members who had not had stroke, and all were interviewed about their use of oral contraceptives.

The odds ratio for ischemic stroke among current users of oral contraceptives was 1.18, as compared to former users or women who had never used oral contraceptive drugs. The risk factor for hemorrhagic stroke was 1.14. For women who smoke and use oral contraceptive drugs, the study found an odds ratio of 3.64.

Previous studies had linked oral contraceptive use to an increased risk of stroke, however those studies were based on oral contraceptives that contained more estogen than in today’s “low-dose” pills.

Read more: A Legacy of Exposure to Secondhand Smoke