Growing up in the 1950s in a house where my dad and his father smoked unfiltered cigarettes caused me to have yearly bouts with respiratory infections and allergies. My grandfather died of lung cancer in 1976 after smoking for 81 years. My father died of a heart attack in 1971, although he quit smoking cold turkey about 1956. I am sure this history, as well as general levels of pollution, affected my health permanently. I have asthma and am on oxygen all the time from restrictive lung disease. Any kind of chemical air pollution can quickly trigger an asthma attack, for which I am heavily medicated. The worst thing for me is that in general, the average person does not recognize the dangers of second hand smoke to anyone if he is not affected himself. Still lots of denial going on.
