What's he doing these days?" I ask the mother of a 10-month-old boy.
"He's crawling all over the place, chasing the family dog around in circles on the living room carpet," she states, smiling at the image of her son and dog going through their daily routine.
We go through the visit and I discover that there are smokers in the home, including his mother, but she adamantly states "we never smoke around" her son.
As he sits steadily on the exam room table, his hand almost completely inside his drooling mouth, massaging his swollen teething gums, I imagine the toxins that his imprinted fingertips are distributing into his developing body: arsenic, cyanide, and lead, just to name a few of the hundreds of toxins that are within my little patient's fingerprints, potentially causing harm that could last a lifetime.
The culprit: cigarettes. Cigarettes that were smoked earlier in the day over morning coffee. Cigarettes that were smoked earlier in the week after a hard day's work.
It's a controversial concept that has caused a news frenzy: thirdhand smoke exposure.
Thirdhand smoke is the contamination left on surfaces after a parent's cigarette is extinguished. It is the contamination that leaks through shared air ducts and ventilation from neighbors in an apartment building that a low income family cannot afford to move away from.
Recently released Philip Morris Company data from the tobacco settlement case showed that after a cigarette has been extinguished, a highly carcinogenic, tobacco-specific substance known as 4-(methylnitrosamino)-I-(3-pyridyl)-1-butanone (NNK) is present for hours, where it can be inhaled by tiny lungs and touched by tiny hands.
In fact, starting in the mid-1900's, as the landmark Times Square Camel smoke ring billboard blew 12-foot-wide smoke rings above thousands of onlookers, scientists were already discovering the link between smoking and lung cancer, and the battle between the tobacco lobbyists, advertisers, politicians and scientists had begun.
Now 58 years after the Marlboro Man advertising campaign first originated, considered one of the most brilliant of all time, and 20 years after one of the original Marlboro men died of lung cancer at 52 years old, the deadly effects of smoking and secondhand smoke are irrefutable.
