Passive Smoking And Vaping Impacts The Dental Health Of Children

We just don’t like to be told, do we …

Identifying what passive smoking, or second-hand smoke does was brought to our attention in the early 1970s. The first Surgeon General’s report to conclude that the involuntary exposure to tobacco smoke by nonsmokers causes disease was considered by the then Surgeon General, Jesse Steinfeld. (Not to be confused with Jerry Seinfeld; he was in his graduating year at Massapequa High.)

Very similar to the inhaled smoke of the one holding the cigarette, second-hand smoke is a complex chemical mix. It certainly contains known carcinogens that include nicotine, carbon monoxide, ammonia, formaldehyde and cyanide. Cigarette packet warnings and advertising bans began in the 1970s, and over the next twenty years smoking became increasingly restricted.

No more smoking in hospitals!!

And that went for the visitors as well.

By 1986 the causal link to exposure was held responsible for excess deaths from lung cancer and cardiac related illnesses.

Mind you, it took until the year 2000 for the first ever Surgeon General’s report on oral health to be published. Despite its proclaimed mission to “protect, promote, and advance the health and safety of (the US) nation” it doesn’t seemed to have improved dental care access, availability or affordability over the last 25 years.

Aside from designated outdoor areas, by 2014 about the only place you could smoke was at home. (Which now has further limitations depending on ownership, strata by-laws and lease agreements.) If you had kids you couldn’t light up in the car on the way home either – that was made illegal in 2009, with a $AU250 on the spot fine.

Nobody wanted to blow the price of a carton on that.

Gradually, with the focus and abundant evidence on the detrimental effect passive smoking has on kids, even smokers moved to relegating it to outside – or certainly not within close vicinity of children.

For many, the reasons to stop were really stacking up. A few moments of perceived relaxation was just getting too hard and too expensive. There was the feeling of a second class citizen whose only achievement was the dispensing of second-hand smoke.

And third-hand smoke.

That’s a thing as well. The residual pollutants from tobacco smoke that adhere to clothing, hair, surfaces, furnishings and dust.

With tobacco having been smoked or chewed for what is now said to be around 12,000 years prior to the 1592 gift Christopher Columbus received in the Bahamas, the amount of that on the planet must make microplastics seem positively manageable. The Italian explorer didn’t even know what the leaves he was given were. That didn’t happen until two crew members sent on an expedition returned to say that they had come across a group of natives with a “band of fire in their hands and herbs whose smoke they drank”.

It’s a poetic entry that Columbus made in his log book.

It evokes the hypothetical of what might have been in terms of trade, health and industry had he not cottoned on; if he’d considered the second-hand information (heh) he’d received as either implausible, or the mediaeval equivalent of cultural appropriation.

A curious thought, huh. And one we apply with alarming regularly – the ‘what if’ game is at times comforting, frustrating, frightening, attritional and downright entertaining.

Stoics would suspend that variable premise, and adhere to predeterminism. Accordingly, Columbus would not and could not have missed that tobacco bus. Even if he had, Jean Nicot, Conrad Gessner, John Hawkins and Sir Walter Raleigh were all on the smoky trail, making it inevitable. We might have been okay had it been used occasionally and ceremonially as it had been by its original cultivators; but as a sought-after commodity there was money to be made with mass production and mass consumption to go with it.
 
And as a matter of interest, the first inklings that tobacco wasn’t good for your lungs was published in 1602. That’s how much we don’t like to be told; because here we are more than 400 years later with people either dying from it, dying to give it up or having given up giving it up.

It’s a different story for kids. If as a parent you’ve made the choice to smoke or vape, you’ve made the choice for them as well.

A decade ago, Japanese research revealed that exposing babies to second-hand smoke at four months doubles the risk of the later development of tooth decay. Newborns under the same vulnerability are 50% more likely to suffer poor dental health.

As unfathomable as it is now that anyone would smoke or vape around a newborn, it’s only been very recently in the history of mankind that any concessions really have been made for neonates. Even mid-last century they’d be brought home from hospital and thrust right into whatever family life had in store. At that point about 49% of the adult population smoked and nobody thought twice about having a baby in the room.

The Japanese study of almost 77,000 young children, found that those who experienced passive smoking at four months were twice as likely to have one decayed, missing or filled baby tooth by the time they were three. The team termed this a ‘significant’ risk to their oral health. However, (and momentarily confusingly) their findings did not prove that breathing second-hand smoke causes tooth decay.

What they identified, is that the sialic acid in saliva is affected in children exposed to tobacco smoke; leading to dental plaque formation, and decay.

E-cigarettes have rapidly gained use. Either as a substitute for tobacco smoking, or increasingly as an activity by adults and adolescents who have never smoked. It has been revealed as equally, if not more addictive than conventional cigarettes, with its detrimental impacts quite rapid in comparison.

Although the long-term health risks of second-hand emissions are largely unknown, limited animal studies suggest there’s high risk of long-term lung injury, and altered neurocognitive development in children exposed to vapes containing nicotine. Further research is needed to determine the scope of health effects associated with second-hand e-cigarette exposure.

Where there can be little doubt their dental health becomes vulnerable, is the monkey-see-monkey-do aspect of growing up around adults who vape – with their own teeth and gums generally negatively affected. Concentrated sugar intake, and the frequency of inhalation which often greatly outweighs that of cigarette smokers is particularly damaging to front tooth enamel. There’s also an an increase in cavities, since it’s not uncommon for those with the habit to vape during the night. This interrupts saliva production, leading to dry mouth, and creating an environment that encourages the bacteria responsible for tooth decay to thrive.

It’s an interesting phenomena where in terms of health, the public perception of vaping is that it’s largely preferable to cigarettes. Realistically, for many reasons it isn’t: notwithstanding the fact that lungs are hugely averse to smoke, water and vapour.

It’s not useful for impairment to be a competition – damaging oral health shouldn’t feel like a win over harming vital organ function. It’s not necessary to wait for science to tell us that vaping around a child isn’t going to be good for them. We already know pollutants aren’t good – no matter where they come from – and we really don’t like to be told.

If we did, nobody would smoke. If not since the 1600s (unlikely – it was novel, and we were all dead by 40) then certainly from the mid-1970s. Vaping wouldn’t be a thing, and there’s no need to wait for someone to tell us inhaling and exhaling chemicals is a toxic thing to do around children. We can work that out for ourselves. Then maybe it’ll mean something.

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