Stop Smoking Way

Aidan Marshall asserted that he took it upon himself to search for evidence of passive smoking’s harmful effects and found “absolutely nothing” (Letters, October 11). I am not sure what information sources Mr Marshall looked at, but he didn’t look very hard.

Two minutes on Google and I found:

- In 1992, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a review of the available evidence regarding the relationship between secondhand smoke and heart disease, and estimated that passive smoking was responsible for 35,000 to 40,000 deaths per year in the United States in the early 1980s.

The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) latest report, “Global Tobacco Epidemic 2008-MPOWER Package”, has thrown up interesting facts and figures about passive smoking in Qatar. WHO’s country report shows that a large number of womenfolk in Qatar are passive smokers.

The report says an estimated 33.8 percent of youth in Qatar are active smokers. Of this 12.7 percent are female.

But the proportion of Qatar’s passive female smokers is an alarming 46.8 percent. This is the percentage of women who are exposed to smoke inside their homes. The rate may even touch 50.3 percent, the report states.

Breathing second-hand tobacco smoke significantly increases the risk of women developing peripheral artery disease (PAD), heart disease and stroke, a study in China has found.

Previous studies have drawn strong links between passive smoking and stroke and heart disease, but this is the first time that an association between second-hand smoke and PAD has been found.

PAD is a circulatory problem in which narrowed arteries reduce blood flow to the limbs, causing pain and increasing the risk of suffering a heart attack or stroke.