By Staff Reports
(Hawaii)– From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.
Kids with asthma are worse off if they have to breathe people’s smoke. It makes their asthma more severe, and raises their risks of conditions like bronchitis and pneumonia. But a study finds that these kids are more likely than kids without asthma to have to breathe secondhand smoke.
Ken Quinto at the National Center for Health Statistics, or NCHS, saw this in national survey data. He also found a difference between who was not exposed to secondhand smoke – and kids without asthma were getting that benefit:
“From 1999 to 2010, the percentage of children without asthma exposed to secondhand smoke decreased from 57 percent to 44 percent, while children with asthma showed no change.”
The study is in an NCHS Data Brief.
Learn more at healthfinder.gov.
HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss.