PLAYING WITH FIRE Richard J B Willis
Some years ago I knew a couple who had two middle-teen girls whose family business was going through a rough patch. This continued for several months. 'We'll be alright after the fire,' they would say. The next time that I saw them the parents were driving a smart new van. They had had their fire, and their shop and accommodation had been destroyed, tragically the girls had also perished in the flames.
Was it an accident or an insurance scam that went devastatingly wrong, as was thought at the time? Who would dare say? There is a mass of evidence to show that fire of another kind - smoking - also has dire consequences. The BMA reports that 120,000 men in the UK aged 30-50 are impotent as a result of smoking. Bad news for couples wishing to start a family. Smoking also reduces the chances of a woman becoming pregnant by up to 40 per cent per cycle.
If conception takes place, pregnant women are three times more likely to have a low birth-weight baby. Unfortunately the problems do not end there, babies born to smoking women also have increased risk of foetal malformations. Passive smoking has been linked to premature birth, cot death, respiratory infections in children and childhood asthma. Women who smoke may also produce smaller volumes of lower quality breast milk.
BMA spokesperson, Dr Vivienne Nathanson, says, 'The sheer scale of damage that smoking causes to reproductive and child health is shocking'. Shocking yes, and also avoidable. Nathanson continues, '… we're not just talking about having children. Men who want to continue to enjoy sex should forget about lighting up given the strong evidence that smoking is a major cause of male sexual impotence'.
A study just published by the University of Sweden, Linkoping, has found that the children of parents who smoke, even if they smoke outside of the house and with the door closed, had twice as much nicotine residue in their body as children of non-smokers. Had the parents smoked inside the house the levels of the residue, cotinine, would have been 15 times that of children from non-smoking homes.
The UK organisation Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) states that around 17,000 children, under the age of 5 in the UK are admitted to hospital per year due to passive smoking. In the light of these figures we do not need experts to tell us that the best way to protect children is not to smoke at all. Yet I have met adults at smoking cessation clinics who say that although they are aware of the harm that passive smoking is doing to their children they still smoke at home.
Habits are hard to break, but if we consider that in playing with fire it is not only the player that gets burnt, but other vulnerable individuals around us, the motivation should be strong enough to break the bonds. This is one area where we should not be afraid to get outside help, and be prepared to ask for it on our knees!