Room to Breathe
by David Pescovitz
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UC Berkeley Civil and Environmental Engineering professor William Nazaroff.
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Everyone knows that secondhand smoke stinks. But what is the real impact on the eleven percent of the U.S. population, the 31 million Americans living with people who puff in the house? UC Berkeley Civil and Environmental Engineering professor William Nazaroff and Brett Singer, a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL), are studying the science of cigarette smoke to better grasp the scale of the problem. Careful analysis of air contaminants could help identify ways to reduce the health risks for people whose housemates won't kick the habit.
"Environmental tobacco smoke is more than a black and white problem," Nazaroff says. "Previously, it's been studied as an entity rather than subdividing it into specific toxic components."
For their study, the researchers calculated the amount of certain toxicants emitted in homes that are attributable to smoking and inhaled by the nonsmokers living there. They then estimated the amount of those same toxicants emitted by industry into outdoor air and breathed by everyone in the United States.
"The irony is that the amount of several of these pollutants breathed by those individuals exposed to environmental tobacco smoke far outweighs the total amount that all the rest of us breathe by living in polluted urban air," he explains.
In May, the Nature Publishing Group highlighted the results of the researcher's latest study, published in the Journal of Exposure Analysis and Environmental Epidemiology. The researchers analyzed 16 hazardous air pollutants including benzene, acetaldehyde, and formaldehyde, chemical species that are known or suspected carcinogens or linked to other serious health effects such as reproductive problems and birth defects.
The "smoking room" at Berkeley Lab features a machine that puffs away and sensors to monitor the pollutants in the air. (courtesy the researcher)
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Nazaroff and Singer explore the physical science of smoldering cigarettes in a laboratory appointed as a smoking lounge. "It's a good thing we have a machine doing the smoking and not a human," Nazaroff says.
The room is instrumented with sensors to measure the change in pollutant concentrations.
"The experiments help us understand indirect smoke exposure, the chemical characterization of the emissions from tobacco smoke, and ultimately how much pollution comes from each cigarette," he explains
Meanwhile, the researchers are also studying data gathered by Nazaroff's former graduate student, Neil Kepeis, about indirect exposure to tobacco smoke in homes and how things like portable filters, closed doors, and open windows, affect air quality. The aim is to develop empirically-proven guidelines that could help non-smokers reduce health risks.
"We'd like what we're learning to be transformed into information that can make a difference in people's lives," Nazaroff says.
William Nazaroff's home page
Pollutant Sources, Dynamics and Chemistry Group at LBL
"Home: The final frontier for second-hand smoke" in Nature View
Neil Kepeis's Exposure Science site
"Pollutants on the fly: Connecting the dots between pollutant sources and us" by Brendan Doherty (Forefront, Spring 2003)
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Updated 5/31/04.
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