Dr P C Gupta
Over the years, numerous studies and surveys have been conducted across various locations and geographies, and the results all say the same thing — tobacco use by adults does have a direct and extremely negative impact on the health of children. Children can be affected by tobacco in many ways, be it through adults smoking around children, or pregnant women smoking or chewing tobacco before delivery. In the first case, the health effects are still avoidable if the adults take the precaution of not smoking around the children, or keeping tobacco use as much away from the children as possible. However, what most people do not realise is the psychological impact on their kids. While we speaking of curbing tobacco use in public, it becaome smore important to realise that our individual responsibility in limiting the exposure of the youth towards the use of tobacco as an everyday activity. If a parent smokes around a child, the child invariably sees it as socially acceptable behavior and takes it as an excuse to start smoking or chewing tobacco.

A recent survey conducted in Indonesia has found that children living in households with a smoker are more malnourished than children in non-smoking households. The study involved more than 33,000 households from rural Java, Indonesia and explores the association between tobacco expenditures and food expenditures and its impact on the nutritional outcomes of children under five years of age.

This study also threw up a few other serious findings, such as — most poor households with at least one smoker spend almost 10 per cent of their income on cigarettes. For families living on or barely above the poverty line in India, such figures would mean that with the costs incurred through tobacco use, very little is left over for simple yet vital needs such as food. It is common knowledge that most households in the rural and semi-urban regions in India, the man of the house is the sole breadwinner. In such circumstances, when a substantial amount of the earning is thrown away in tobacco use, it impacts the nutrition of the children in these households. Moreover such families live in slums and have small houses, so the children are directly exposed to tobacco through proximity to the smoker in the family, thus making the undernoursihed children exposed to the dangers of tobacco as well.

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