Statutory Warning: Cigarette Smoking is injurious to health.                                                              

                    What the above warning, which is mandatory on all cigarette ads and packaging, omits to mention is that smoking cigarettes is not just injurious to the people who smoke them; it's also harmful for everybody around them.

                    Passive smoking - breathing in smoke from other people's cigarettes - is considered today as a major health risk all over the world, and causes more deaths every year than many major diseases.

Consider this:

                * Children exposed to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) are estimated to be about 1.4 times as likely to suffer from asthma symptoms as                      children who are not exposed. 

                * The risk of lower respiratory illnesses (such as croup, bronchitis, bronchiolitis and pneumonia) is about 60% higher in children exposed to                      environmental tobacco smoke during the first eighteen months of life than in unexposed children. 

                * Carbon monoxide or CO present in cigarette smoke promotes cholesterol deposits in the arteries; impairs vision and judgment and reduces                      alertness to sounds.

                * Secondhand smoke can almost double a person's risk of a heart attack.

                * Secondhand smoke is the third leading cause of preventable death in the US, killing 53,000 nonsmokers in the U.S. each year. For every                      eight smokers the tobacco industry kills, it takes one nonsmoker with them.

                * Secondhand smoke has been classified as a Group A Carcinogen--a substance known to cause cancer in humans. There is no safe level of                      exposure for Group A toxins.

                * Chemicals present in ETS (Environmental tobacco smoke) include irritants and systemic toxicants, mutagens and carcinogens, and                      reproductive and developmental toxicants. To date, over 50 compounds in tobacco smoke have been identified as carcinogens.

                * Nonsmoking individuals living with heavy smokers have four times the risk of heart attack compared with those who live in smoke-free                      environments.

                All these are just snippets from studies which prove, pretty conclusively, that passive smoking (being exposed to cigarette smoke) IS harmful     for the health. One reason why smoking in the workplace, and in public places, is banned in many states in the US, and is being seriously reviewed         in others.

                So if smoking is really all that bad for the health, why hasn't it actually been banned? One simple reason; the money which tobacco             companies have  constantly pumped in over the years in a campaign to discredit anti-smoking lobbies. Even to the extent of sponsoring studies by researchers  and scientists paid specifically to conduct research that prove smoking is not  harmful. But the tide has gradually turned over the years, culminating  now in a anti-smoking campaign in the US that Cigarette companies have been forced to pay for!

               So what should be done in ? Should smoking be banned in public places? Or is that just an over-reaction?