Tobacco Use Affects Families
We are all affected by tobacco—even if we don’t smoke. Secondhand smoke, air pollution, and the high costs of health care that come with tobacco use affect our families. That’s why it’s important for each of us to do our part to prevent tobacco use.
Tobacco Use Affects Our Air
Stepping outside to get a breath of fresh air is getting harder to do in many communities because of dirty air. Particle pollution—a blend of fine solids and aerosols—floats in the air we breathe.1 Smoking adds to that pollution.
Tobacco Use Affects Our Health
The added pollution from using tobacco triggers health problems ranging from coughing and wheezing to heart attacks. Air pollution and secondhand smoke can hurt people who don’t smoke. It is linked to harmful effects in children from worsening asthma symptoms to increasing the number of colds and ear infections to putting babies at risk for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).2
| Smokeless tobacco is not an alternative to smoking cigarettes. Smokeless tobacco is linked to mouth cancers, gum disease, and teeth loss.3 |
Secondhand smoke can hurt people of all ages. It can trigger problems not only for a baby left with a daycare provider who smokes, but also a teenager in a club that allows smoking, or an adult who works in an office where others smoke.
Tobacco Use Affects Our Wallets
People who use tobacco often need more health care than people who don’t use tobacco. The costs of increased visits to the doctor, medicines, and hospital stays add up. Even if you don’t use tobacco, your family’s health care costs could increase if you get sick from breathing secondhand smoke. Each year, tobacco-related illnesses in the United States cost $81 billion.4
Take Action To Prevent Tobacco Use
What can your family do to prevent tobacco use and its health consequences? You can get involved through the following activities:
- Quit smoking now or encourage your friends and loved ones to quit. Visit Tobacco Cessation: You Can Quit Smoking Now!
- Make sure businesses near your home, like restaurants, stores and supermarkets, follow the national law that prohibits the sale of all tobacco to any individual under the age of 18. If they aren't following the law, there's help to make them. Visit Frequently Asked Questions for more information.
- Think about joining one of the many tobacco-related working groups or coalitions of individuals or agencies concerned with preventing and controlling tobacco use in your community, county, or State.
- Educate your kids. Obtain the "Educational Guide on Lung Health for Elementary School Students." It provides helpful lessons, handouts, activities, and resources to teach children about asthma and tobacco prevention.
Tobacco use—whether it’s the pollution-haze over the highway, secondhand smoke we breathe in at a restaurant, or watching a child’s friend suffer from asthma—touches all of us. Even if you don’t smoke, tobacco puts you and your family at risk. The only way to beat this global problem is with a solution that begins in your home and community.
Smoking harms nearly every organ of the body and causes many diseases. Today, tobacco results in the death of one in ten adults worldwide.
WHO Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic, 2008—The MPOWER package. |
| Half of the people who smoke today will eventually be killed by tobacco.8 Smokeless tobacco is equally as deadly. One study found that almost 3 out of 4 of daily users of smokeless tobacco had non-cancerous or pre-cancerous lesions (sores) in the mouth.9 |
Sources
Family Guide: Younger Students Still Smoking
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Tobacco
World Health Organization. Youth Tobacco Survey.
World Health Organization. World No Tobacco Day 2008.
Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids
NIDA InfoFacts: Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products
Nicotine Addiction
Tobacco Prevention and Control
|
Home | Site Map | SAMHSA | Frequently Asked Questions | About Us | Contact Us | Join Our E-mail Update
Talk With Your Child 
