14 DAY TRIAL // The effects of smoking on one's health have long since been established. The harms of second-hand smoking have also been carefully investigated, and its threat level assessed. But very few investigators ever considered the influence of so-called “third-hand” smoking on people's health. Researchers in the United States have now been able to determine that nicotine residues left behind on indoor surfaces by smokers may be reacting with gases in the air, to produce compounds that have been associated with the onset and development of cancer in previous studies. Tobacco fumes can apparently endure on household items for quite a while, Chemistry World reports.
The investigators, who were based at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), and led by expert Hugo Destaillats, conducted their experiments of cellulose, as a common household material. They placed a bloc of the stuff inside the truck of a smoking driver for three days, while another bloc was placed in a tubular-flow reactor, in the highly controlled confines of a lab. The second batch of the material was also exposed to vaporized nicotine, the team adds.
“Certain compounds – such as ambient nitrous acid or nitrogen dioxide – are present in higher quantities indoors rather than outdoors. [After the study], we found that ambient gases [in the truck] reacted with residual nicotine to generate tobacco-specific nitrosamines that are known to be carcinogenic,” Destaillats reveals. “One group that is particularly at risk from this type of smoke are children. Children interact with their environment in a very different way, so their exposure could be twenty times higher than adults',” Harvard Medical School (HMS) Assistant Professor of Paediatrics Jonathan Winickoff adds. He has been studying the dangers of third-hand smoking on kids for many years.
“I think this is important work that will set the stage for many further studies on residual tobacco smoke contamination. The implication of third-hand smoke is that there is no way for a person to smoke indoors without contaminating that environment,” the HMS expert adds. The thing about this type of smoking is that its dangers are fairly difficult to quantify. That is to say, there are many factors contributing to a person's risk of inhaling the dangerous compounds, such as whether the room is large or small, ventilated or not, or covered/filled with upholstery, wallpaper, and clothing. Nicotine residues accumulate differently in all these situations, the researchers say.