May 31: World No Tobacco Day

Perhaps you didn’t even know that World No Tobacco Day would be celebrated the next day. It simply bothered him that in the cellar, a closed place, someone was smoking.

“On the Isle of Youth, where I am from, that is not allowed,” he told me. Meanwhile, he argued, how unbearable the smell given off by tobacco is.

I thought, then, of the many places, many of those where it is ‘forbidden’, where I had to put up with it.

However, those who give off that smoke seem not to notice the discomfort and, even more, the damage that their actions cause to the rest of the people.

More than 4,000 chemicals, most of them harmful, have been identified in tobacco smoke.

In 43 of them, carcinogenic effects have been verified and others are closely linked to cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases.

Those who are exposed to it are passive smokers and between 20 and 30 percent are at risk of lung cancer, while 25% will experience heart disease.

This passive consumption during pregnancy, in addition to harming the mother, is related to health problems for the fetus and infant.

And in the case of children, they are in danger of suffering the sudden death of the newborn; or suffering from chronic otitis media, difficulty breathing, bronchitis, asthma, pneumonia, cough, among other complications.

According to sex, in men, the most associated diseases are usually pulmonary emphysema, peptic ulcer, angina pectoris and acute myocardial infarction.

Those who smoke daily seem to ignore another alert: tobacco ages. Scientists warn that it is on the face where their lesions predominate, since the effects of the ultraviolet rays of the Sun are greater.

It also causes dehydration of the epidermis and destruction of the elastic fibers of the dermis with the appearance of wrinkles and premature skin aging.

Cellular suffocation is added due to the decrease in capillary circulation, appearing grayish and dull complexion.

Nicotine and tars are deposited on the surface of the skin, and sinus congestion with chronic rhinitis caused by smoke, results in swollen eyelids.

It is incredible, then, that knowing these damages so many individuals continue to smoke. It is even more unusual to force others to share this vice.

Will we always be the victims of those inconsiderate people that we meet every day at the bus stop, the bus, in the store… or even in our own home?

On a day like today, when World No Tobacco Day is celebrated, it would be a good time to invite you to reflect. For their sake and also for us.

Translated by Casterman Medina de Leon