Call for smoking ban in private homes

An anti-smoking activist and community-health specialist has urged the Hong Kong government to ban tobacco smoking in cars and homes so as to protect children’s health, according to a story by Emily Tsang for the South China Morning Post.

Professor Lam Tai-hing was speaking after a new study indicated that secondhand smoke could make children prone to heart attacks and strokes later in life.

Such conditions were in addition to other known risks such as lung cancer, middle-ear disease and respiratory disease.

Lam, professor of community medicine at the University of Hong Kong, said that while smoking in cars when children were present had been banned in some countries, so far no authorities had made a similar ruling for private households.

“Smoking in front of children should be seen as poisoning and abusing them,” he said.

Lam said Hong Kong so far had no legislation specifically to protect children from secondhand smoke.

The study, published in the European Heart Journal, said data from 2,401 people in Finland and 1,375 in Australia showed passive smoking led to a thickening of children’s artery walls, ageing blood vessels by 3.3 years by adulthood.