Guest post: "Banning smoking in cars is essential to protect children's health"

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As adults, we are the product of our upbringing and our inheritance: what we value, how we communicate and behave, are the results of this education. The same is true of our health – whether we like it or not, the way we view our health is often influenced by our parents.

Smoking is one habit that parents often go out of their way to hide from their children. Whether it is going out to the garden to smoke there instead of in the living room, or making sure lighters and tobacco are stashed away out of their reach, they go to great lengths to balance their habit with the health and wellbeing of their children. Of course, parents want to protect children from their unhealthy habits, so as to give them a better start in life.

Yet, we have all seen parents leaning out of the driver's seat window with a lit cigarette, their children in the backseat. What they often do not realise is that the car still fills with toxic vapours that their children are breathing in. Around 80 per cent of smoke is invisible and much of it stays in the car even if the window is open - if you could see these vapours, you'd realise they actually engulf the inside of the car.

Children are inadvertently designed to be perfect passive smokers. They breathe more rapidly than adults, so they are much more exposed to the dangers of secondhand smoke. Their airways, lungs and immune systems are still developing so they are much more susceptible to damage. Also, and perhaps most importantly, they have no control over their surroundings; over a third of children who are exposed to secondhand smoke in vehicles do not feel able to ask the person to stop. They are scared, embarrassed, and do not know what to say. Cars, whilst being feats of modern engineering, are also the perfect venue for passive smoking: the child is strapped in and so has no means of moving away from the smoke.

Passive smoking is a huge threat to children – they are still growing, still developing into the adults that parents pour so much of their hope, dreams and love into. These children face a huge disadvantage if they are exposed to secondhand smoke, which can bring on pneumonia, ear infections and bronchitis. Around three million children every year are exposed to secondhand smoke in a car - and every week, 200 children have to visit their GP because of the effects.

As the Chief Medical Officer for England, I am behind the change in the law that is coming into force on October 1, which will make smoking in any private vehicle containing a child under 18 illegal. It will be engrained in the process of learning to drive, becoming a part of both the Highway Code and driving theory tests. This normalisation is essential if we want to impress upon people the dangers of smoking in cars and protect the health of our children.

Ultimately, the best thing to do is to stop smoking. As we head into October, Public Health England's Stoptober campaign provides a supportive and fun opportunity for smokers to give up. People who stop smoking for 28 days are five times more likely to stop for good, and the campaign has helped thousands of people to quit smoking.

This could not be more important – the best thing a smoker can do for their health is quit; the best thing a smoker can do for their children's health is quit.

I urge people to abide by this law for the safety of our children.

I'm just fucked off with this constant 'smokers are evil' narrative, and the prissy purse-lipped ban everything mentality that it engenders. We know that smoking is bad for us; we get that, but this entire passive smoking thing is a con and hounding people away from pubs (pubs fgs! these places were never health spas) and away from doors of buildings ie in the open air, as though you're going to catch cancer just by walking past a person having a fucking fag, is ludicrous. I might smoke, but I don't drive. I can't honestly see that my one little fag that I have now and then, outside, not in a car, not in a house (not even in my own fucking house), not in a hospital, not blown into some poor little kiddy's face, is even remotely comparable to the harm caused by the thousands of vehicles blarting out fuel particles or whatever you call them into the atmosphere for no other reason than that the people in those vehicles want to sit in a metal box on their way to work rather than walk/cycle. I'm fed up of being made to feel like a bogeyman for indulging in a legal activity that as far as I can see has fuck all effect on those around me and which, as a person with a chronic mh condition, I am pretty much doing as a process of self-medication (look it up - I didn't realise until fairly recently but there are very good reasons why psych inpatients smoke so much and it isn't just because of boredom).

So, none of this is actually aimed at you, then, cruikshank? Your not smoking in a car with a child in it. So why the hatred?

I'm with std - being in the car with my parents smoking in it made me feel sick. I didn't get car sick in other people's cars or if my parents weren't smoking. Why do you think this is a lie?

Of course it's aimed at me. I'm a smoker. I am public enemy number one. There is no reasonable discourse, no dispensation, just law after law after law and shit after shit after shit coming my way about how much harm I do to people, with my 'idiot sticks' and my 'selfish' ways and how I 'stink' etc. Yes, it fucks me off. Yes, I'm sick of the constant drip-drip nature of the legislation that in its zeal to hound a group of people completely ignores, as I say, the very real and proven threat to child and indeed adult health posed by millions of petrol heads. I may not be expressing this rationally right now, but this is how a person looks when they feel that they are being got at from all sides.

Second hand cigarette smoke contains, amongst 4000 chemicals, these, which are suspected to cause cancer:

Arsenic

Benzene

Beryllium

1,3 butadiene

Cadmium

Chromium

Ethylene oxide

Nickel

Polonium 210

Vinyl chloride

Formaldehyde

Toluene

It also contains:

Hydrogen cyanide

Carbon monoxide

Ammonia

I don't want to inhale these chemicals. And I cannot understand why anyone would think it is OK for children to have to inhale them.

Maybe Cruikshank is a world-ranking scientist, who has done groundbreaking work that proves all the other research about smoking and passive smoking is wrong, and that none of the above chemicals are toxic, or irritant to the respiratory system, or cause cancer - or knows of a world-ranking and respected scientist who has done this - but I am surprised that there has been zero coverage of such a major news story.

Also, it may interest you to know, cruikshank - that I do not agree with the smoking ban in hospitals/on hospital grounds.

My mother is a smoker, and I know how it affects her if she can't get a cigarette - I remember how she reacted when she tried to quit smoking - and as a nurse, I know how stressful hospital stays can be. Frankly, when you are in hospital is the last time you should be trying to quit smoking - never mind being forced to quit.

When I trained, wards had two dayrooms - a smoking one and a non-smoking one - and I can see the need for smokers to smoke in hospital.

Right. When you can point to a study that shows that passive smoking causes cancer, we can talk.

Sorry, x-posted. Glad to see that you don't agree with the hospital grounds thing. Don't get me wrong, I know that what I am doing is eventually going to kill me. I just don't think it's going to kill everyone else around me as well, and I am fed up to the back teeth with being told that I am dangerous, selfish and all the rest of it. I still can't quite get my head around the rationale of banning fags in pubs. Alcohol causes loads of deaths every year. No-one goes to a pub for the good of their health. But it's smokers who are the problem? Away to fuck, seriously.

Why only cancer, cruikshank? Passive smoking causes other problems - according to the NHS Choices website, it can cause:

• cot death (sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS) – this is twice as likely in babies whose mothers smoke

• developing asthma – smoking can also trigger asthma attacks in children who already have the condition

• serious respiratory (breathing) conditions such as bronchitis and pneumonia – younger children are also much more likely to be admitted to hospital for a serious respiratory infection

• meningitis

• coughs and colds

• a middle ear infection (otitis media), which can cause hearing loss

Are you OK with children suffering these things? SIDS is pretty damn serious, isn't it? Meningitis isn't a walk in the park. Asthma, bronchitis and pneumonia - can be life threatening/serious illnesses.

Are you seriously saying that, if passive smoking is proved to cause cancer, then 'we can talk' - but you don't care that it can have other serious effects on a child?

SIDS is pretty much an unknown quantity though, isn't it, in that it's a catchall term that says 'we don't know' rather than a diagnosis as such. Asthma etc I'll give you although we live in a world with lots of pollutants and I don't see Shell etc being told to hide their petrol pumps away from hospital doors, plus how can passive smoking cause a cold? It's a virus. How can a fag cause a virus? And afaik there is no proven link between so-called passive smoking and cancer. None.

Pubes point 1 is the main reason I want to stop smoking.

My son has seen me smoking his entire life - things have changed though, there's no way he's following in my faggy footsteps. Upping the age limit for buying fags was an utterly spot on move.

I wonder how many people who support this law drive a diesel car? Fact is fumes from a diesel car cause more harm than second hand smoke. Second hand smoke at best raises a risk - there is no proof that shows second hand smoke is THE cause of any illness.

Sdtg - all those chemicals are already in the air and some in the food you eat - you breath them in even if people don't smoke and you will ingest them even if people don't smoke - your argument is a little weak. Maybe you need to do a little research to find out what else contains those chemicals before complaining about smoke.

Passive smoking does not cause colds. It causes respiratory problems.

People with existing respiratory difficulties suffer more when, for instance they catch a cold. This means more time off school, more time in doctor's surgeries and poorer health.

Cars may also damage health, but a child subjected to passive smoking is also subjected to car fumes. It's not as though one cancels out the other. Passive smoking just makes the situation worse.

Merry mouse there are more diesel cars than smokers so maybe the govt. has banned the wrong thing?

Children are normally only in cars for very short journeys, to school - from school? Run to the shops? So maybe anything up to an hour at most and maybe the parents have a single cigarette in that time, maybe two at most. Kids go home though and spend 8-12 hours in the house and the parents smoke for 12 hours in the house and maybe go through 20 cigarettes - yet it's ok for them to smokes in the house but not in the car - the law is an ass.

Maybe diesel cars and smoking near children should also be banned - doesn't make inhaling cigarette smoke in a car any less bad for your health.

Even the police have said how are they going to force it. They cant even enforce ppl who drive and on their mobiles. So what is more important catching ppl smoking in the car or catching criminals.

I smoke and even ive stopped smoking in the car when my teens are in the car. Well 1 is already 18 and the other 16