Passive smoking kills 50,000 Americans each year

World Health Organization researchers have recently reported that passive smoking or secondhand smoke kills about 600,000 people worldwide each year, including 379,000 deaths from heart disease, 165,000 deaths from lower respiratory infections, 36,900 deaths from asthma and 21,400 lung cancer deaths.

Both passive smoking and active smoking have been known to boost death risk from heart disease, stroke, infections, asthma, and lung cancer among other things in smokers and passive smokers.

In the United States, passive smoking causes about 50,000 deaths annually in the united States with the vast majority of the deaths from heart disease, according to a report published in Circulation.

Rebbecca E Schane MD and Stanton A Glantz Ph.D of University of California in San Francisco cited a report in the Oct 13, 2009 issue of Circulation saying passive smoking causes about 50,000 deaths annually in the united States with the vast majority of the deaths from heart disease.

The authors said the effects of secondhand smoke on many pathophysiological mediators of coronary artery disease are as detrimental as active smoking.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 438,000 people in the United States died prematurely from cigarette smoking and exposure to tobacco smoke annually during the period of 1997 to 2001.

Passive smoking kills 60,000 Chinese people each year

Gan Q. and colleagues of University of California in Berkeley California published a study in Tobacco Control saying that passive smoking caused more than 22,000 lung cancer deaths in 2002 in China. They estimated that passive smoking led to loss of nearly 230,000 years of healthy life from lung cancer.

The authors also found passive smoking was responsible for 33,800 ischemic heart disease deaths in China in 2002 and a loss of more than one quarter of a million years of healthy life from ischemic heart disease.

Chinese women accounted for 80 percent of the passive smoking population and the number of deaths among women caused by passive smoking was about two-thirds of deaths from the two diseases caused by smoking.

The authors concluded "Even without considering the passive smoking risks for other diseases and among children that have been documented in other countries, passive smoking poses serious health hazards for non-smokers, especially for adult female non-smokers in China, adding more urgency to the need for measures to be taken immediately to protect the health of non-smokers and curb the nation's tobacco epidemic."

David Liu