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Home > Healthy You > Healthy You Magazine > Protecting Your Health > Secondhand Smoke and You

Secondhand Smoke and You

Your not-so-clean-air

Secondhand SmokeIf you don’t smoke but have worked in a place where it’s permitted, you really are a smoker. “Breathing secondhand smoke in one eight-hour shift is equivalent to smoking nearly two packs a day,” says Alice Dalla Palu, executive director of the Coalition for a Smoke-Free Valley. More than 65,000 nonsmokers die yearly from heart disease and cancer caused by secondhand smoke pollution. “This is a serious public health issue.”

“Until a law is passed in Pennsylvania banning indoor smoking in public places,” Dalla Palu says, “people need to avoid secondhand smoke as much as possible.” Here’s how:
  • Don’t let anyone smoke in your home or car.
  • Patronize smoke-free restaurants. Encourage managers of restaurants that permit smoking to change their policy.
  • Remind your elected representatives about the dangers of secondhand smoke. Encourage them to pass clean-air legislation.
If you’re a smoker concerned about harming others, Dalla Palu says, a tobacco treatment program is an effective way to stop smoking. In the meantime, follow these guidelines to protect others from your secondhand smoke:
  • If you need to smoke, go outdoors.
  • Never smoke around children. It can lead to pneumonia, bronchitis, earaches and asthma.
  • Don’t smoke in the car. Even with a cracked window, invisible toxins stay in the air up to four hours after the cigarette is extinguished.

Click here for a list of smoke-free restaurants in the Lehigh Valley.

Need Help? To schedule an appointment or to find out more information, call 610-402-CARE (8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Monday-Friday).

This page last updated 6/13/08 02:08 PM
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May June 2006

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      Lehigh Valley Hospital has campuses in Allentown and Bethlehem, Pa. and serves the Pennsylvania communities of Easton, Doylestown, Quakertown, Hazelton, Lehighton, Perkasie, Pottstown, Pottsville, Reading, Scranton, Wilkes Barre, Stroudsburg, and the Poconos and also Phillipsburg and Flemington, N.J., and western New Jersey. You don't have to travel to Philadelphia or New York for quality health care.

      		 
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