Exposing children down with flu to passive smoking can put them at a higher risk of being admitted to an intensive care unit, researchers warn.
For their study, Dr. Karen Wilson of Children's Hospital Colorado and colleagues included more than 100 children down with flu and hospitalized in New York State. They found children with flu when exposed to second-hand smoke, making them five times higher risk of being admitted to the intensive care unit and 70 percent longer stay than children without the smoke exposure, Reuters reported.
"We've known that (second-hand smoke) is bad for children in a whole variety of ways," Dr. Susan Coffin, who has studied flu complications in children at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told Reuters. "With this (study) we see that smoke exposure not only increases risk of hospitalization but it specifically makes the course of illness worse."
Up to this date scientists have detected 7,000 chemical compounds in secondhand smoke - 250 poisonous and 70 carcinogenic. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) is behind the 3,000 lung cancer deaths each year reported in the country and damages the respiratory health of hundreds of thousands of children.
In the first- of- its- kind study, the researchers examined the medical records of about 117 children who were admitted to hospital between 2002 and 2009.
About 40 percent of the children were reported to be exposed to secondhand smoke and 18 percent required intensive care and six percent needed the breathing tube and two days additional hospital stay.
Among smoke exposed children, 30 percent needed intensive care admission for at least four days compared to 10 percent of unexposed children.
Informing the health experts about the secondhand exposure can help in better treatment.
"If you have a child who comes into the hospital and they are exposed to tobacco smoke, they have more risk of going on to develop more severe illness," Wilson told Reuters Health.
"Obviously not smoking and protecting children from smoke won't stop them from getting influenza, but it may help it from becoming a severe illness or (preventing) complications that we sometimes see."
The study has been published in The Journal of Pediatrics.
