Smoking and your respiratory system do not mix. This should be self-explanatory and to be honest, smoking doesn’t mix well with anything. Asthmatics who smoke have considerably more asthmatic attacks and hospital admittances statistically than other non-smoking asthmatics. This isn’t shocking news and it’s not even new information. The fact is that sometimes an individual doesn’t hold their health as high in their list of priorities and they maybe should. There’s not much that can be done about that beyond providing the information should they start to realise that their own wellbeing should always come first.
Since the UK smoking ban in 2007 a great deal of things have changed. Pubs have lost their distinctive smoky scent, you no longer get bizarre smoking areas in airports and you’re going to see less cigarette butts in general. Another change which you may have been unaware of is, as soon as the ban was enforced the number of hospital admittances for asthma related complications dropped dramatically. It’s continued to drop steadily since 2007 which is the reverse of what it was doing before the ban.
Now the ban doesn’t stop anyone from smoking it just regulates where they can smoke. The idea was to remove the health risk which second hand smoke posed to non-smokers. Which was fair enough really, those people hadn’t chosen to smoke and as such they shouldn’t’ have been exposed to the health risks which the addiction causes.
With less smoke wafting around people are exposed to it much less often meaning that it almost vanishes as a stimulant for asthmatic attacks. The statistics confirm this as the difference is so stark.
The smoking ban is and its effect on the asthmatic population is a stark reminder of just how damaging smoke can be. Simply by moving smokers away from everyone else we’ve seen a nationwide drop in the amount of asthma related hospitalisations, amazing.
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