Cigarette smoke contains more than 4,700 chemical components, 60 of which can cause cancer and have been proven to do so; they are called carcinogens.
In 1992, a report by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the United States showed that secondhand smoking is as dangerous as direct smoking. This report classified the dangers of smoking as a type A carcinogen, which is the highest rate of risk of cancer.
Cigarette smoke is classified into two types: inhaled smoke and outer smoke.
Inhaled smoke is the smoke that comes out of the smoker’s mouth after being inhaled and is the smoke that went through the filter tip, whereas the outer smoke is the smoke the comes out of the burnt tip of the cigarette into air without going through the filter. The chemical composition of both types is largely the same since both are the result of burning tobacco, but there are some differences in the quantities of the components, as well as other differences. One of them is that the temperature of inhaled smoke is higher than that of the outer smoke since the outer smoke has higher and more concentrated quantities of the organic chemical components compared with inhaled smoke. Studies show the outer smoke is even more dangerous and more carcinogenic.
Some chemical components of cigarette smoke
Chemical component
Toxic
Harmful to the airway
Carcinogenic
