Many smokers don’t even know, they are harming their babies heavily while taking that pleasure puff or smoking their depression or tiredness away.
Yes, you pass on the effects of the smoke to the speechless babies, who can neither protest against or have laws by their side — just fall victim silently.
Nicotine, one of the several thousand constituents of tobacco smoke, has a byproduct called cotinine, which is found in higher concentration in the urine of babies.
This is what a research team from the Universities of Warwick and Leicester found. According to the authors,
Our findings clearly show that by accumulating cotinine, babies become heavy passive smokers secondary to the active smoking of parents.
Babies and children are routinely exposed to cigarette smoking by their caregivers in their homes, without the legislative protection available to adults in public places.
The biggest independent risk factor for cotinine’s increased levels is — ‘smoking mothers.’ Yes, maternal smoking is found to quadrupled cotinine levels!
And smoking fathers too don’t spare the little ones – a smoking father doubles the amount of cotinine in urine, with both parents leading to 5.5-times higher cotinine content in their babies compared to those with nonsmoking parents.
Though, the researchers are sure of the health hazards smoking can cause to babies, they are not sure — how nicotine actually affects the little ones.
What adds to the problem is that though it’s true, smoking in public places can be banned by legislation, — what is a disaster is the difficulty in enforcing anti-smoking laws in the home! This will always live as a barrier to finding an effective solution to this.