I remember seeing copies of old adverts from newspapers in 1900 that promoted corsets filled with radioactive material. These items were said to be good for your health, to cure rheumatism among other things. I doubt that there would be much of a market for them today, even supposing you were allowed to offer them for sale. Similarly in the 1950′s smoking was promoted as being good for you whereas now we are much more aware of the risks to the smoker and the people that passively share their smoke.
Some disturbing news appeared this month in Chemistry World (March 2010) connected with "third hand" smoking. To explain, "first hand" smoking is when you actively smoke tobacco. Second hand smoke is what you get from someone else’s cigarette. Third hand smoke is produced when smoke residues line the surface of your car roof or the walls of your home and then react chemically with other household gases. The main culprit is nicotine, in a recent trial researchers found three cancer-causing chemicals produced when nicotine residue reacted with nitrous acid (a common household vapour) on walls.
Particularly worrying is the suggestion that children are 20 times more at risk than adults because they spend more time touching, rubbing against and even licking walls. The bottom line is that anyone who smokes indoors or in a car is contaminating their environment and that contamination is more of a risk to children than we had previously realised.
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