Are Secondhand Smoking Tests Effective?

Published on November 19, 2009 11:21 AM

As it is known not only cigarette smoking is harmful but also cigarette smoke can affect the people’s health. In general passive smoking is the inhalation of smoke, called secondhand smoke (SHS) or environmental tobacco smoke (ETS), from tobacco products used by others. It occurs when tobacco smoke penetrate any environment, causing its inhalation by people within that environment.
A recent study found that exposure to ETS, which includes the smoke from a burning cigarette as well as second-hand or exhaled smoke, causes some 3,000 U.S. lung-cancer deaths and thousands of new cases of childhood asthma each year. ETS is also linked to pneumonia, bronchitis, and other health problems.

Today there are numerous methods which can test cigarette smoke and nicotine. For example some are laboratory based while others are used for home testing purposes. Most of these tests provide a quick, accurate and on-the-spot determination of a person’s level of exposure to tobacco products either actively or passively. Frequently are tested parents of young children, workers in a smoky workplace, smokers trying to quit, insurance companies, smoking cessation counselors and other persons concerned about the harmful effects of second hand smoke.
Almost of these tests are easy to use. For example non-invasive urine nicotine strip tests which are reasonably fast and precise and can find exposure to second hand smoke along with active usage of cigarettes, pipes, cigars etc.

Such kind of tests measure the levels of cotinine, a byproduct of the body’s breakdown of nicotine which is an active component found in tobacco products and tobacco smoke. This test is very sensitive and can measure amounts as low as 6 ng of cotinine per milliliter of urine (6 billionths of a gram in one fifth of a teaspoon). Cotinine is an extensively accepted indicator of recent tobacco product use and exposure, including second hand smoke exposure.

But there are techniques which have been developed especially for observing carcinogenic pollutants in environmental tobacco smoke and are thousand times more sensitive than previous techniques. One of such techniques is when two dual computer-programmable luminescence detectors are used along with high performance liquid chromatography and combined with a unique new sample preparation protocol to screen for a wide range of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and their equally hazardous alkyl derivatives in environmental tobacco smoke.

This new technique can work with less than a milligram of sample and enables researchers to identify and estimate the concentrations of both parent and alkyl PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) with precision and accuracy.

This new investigation method enables the researchers to significantly shorten sampling times and reduce the amount of hazardous solvent waste material generated for analysis. Researchers concluded that stop smoking is the best advice which will not only benefit smokers, but everyone around them.