A Tip from Susan: ?€?Third hand?€? Smoke
Babies can absorb particles and gases emitted by cigarettes from walls, clothes, hair and skin -- including up to 90 percent of the nicotine found in tobacco smoke -- experts warn.
USA Today reported Aug. 6, 2006 that even smokers who refrain from lighting up with their infants in the room may not be fully protecting their children. George Matt of San Diego State University and colleagues found that babies, who explore the world by crawling and touching, can swallow, inhale, or absorb dangerous chemicals from cigarette-smoke residue, which can stay in the environment for months.
The preliminary study found that even babies whose parents only smoked outside had detectable levels of the nicotine byproduct cotinine in their bodies, perhaps from hugging their parent. The cotinine levels of such children were 50 times lower than those of children whose parents smoked around them, but seven times higher than the cotinine levels in children of nonsmokers.
Cotinine [COAT-e-neen] is a chemical that is made by the body from nicotine, which is found in cigarette smoke. Since cotinine can be made only from nicotine, and since nicotine enters the body with cigarette smoke, cotinine measurements can show how much cigarette smoke enters your body.
Unfortunately, the fact that nicotine alone is an extremely toxic poison often goes unmentioned. Not many people realize that nicotine is also sold commercially in the form of a pesticide! And every year, many children go to the emergency room after eating cigarettes or cigarette butts. Sixty milligrams of nicotine (about the amount in three or four cigarettes if all of the nicotine were absorbed) will kill an adult, but consuming only one cigarette's worth of nicotine is enough to make a toddler severely ill! Nicotine poisoning causes vomiting and nausea, headaches, difficulty breathing, stomach pains and seizures.
My mother (who is a smoker) visited us when my daughter was an infant. I asked her to put on an over-shirt over her normal clothing when she went outside to smoke. This over-shirt was kept outside of the home and then she washed her hands upon coming back into the house. This method won?€™t stop all possibility of nicotine exposure but should surely decrease the amount.
Love,
Susan
References: USA Today, Jointogether.org, Foundation for Blood Research FBR.org, Health.howstuffworks.com