Six-hundred and sixty-two nurse students (aged 25.2 +/- 4.11 years; 153 were males) answered a self-administered, anonymous questionnaire about smoking habits and knowledges in a large urban Teaching School of Nursing. The overall response rate was 88%. Current smokers were 336 (51%), former smokers 80 (12%). Nurse students claimed to know the dangers of tobacco and nurse training seemed to modify the preferential source of information about tobacco smoking towards medical fonts; however, only a quarter of nurse students considered medical smoking cessation approaches as useful for quitting and advised patients with tobacco-related diseases against smoking.