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It is hard to argue against trying to protect kids from toxic exposures, but in the case of tobacco at least, the burden of doing so should not just be the job of parents and families. Rather, it should be shared by all of us through instituting better policies that protect everyone from exposure to secondhand smoke (SHS) and make tobacco products less accessible, less affordable and (perhaps most important) less attractive. In this special e-issue, a set of papers focused on children and youth shows the special challenges of doing so.
Far too many children are still involuntarily exposed to SHS in their homes. Mbulo et al,1 analysing data from the Global Adult Tobacco Survey for 21 countries, estimate that more than 500 million children under the age of 15 are exposed, including a shockingly high 79% of Indonesian children. Further, too many of these children come from impoverished communities, compounding the inequalities they already face and showing why tobacco is a global social justice issue that worsens both health and socioeconomic disadvantage, as Hajizadeh and Nandi discuss.2 In their study, poor children in almost all of the 26 countries studied were exposed to SHS daily. This exposure (including both prenatal and postnatal) comes at a cost: increased respiratory morbidity for children, as Snodgrass et al show in a study from Singapore. …