Thirdhand smoke wafting off moviegoers hurts air quality in theaters
“Nonsmoking” doesn’t necessarily mean smoke-free. A new experiment monitoring airborne contaminants inside a nonsmoking theater indicates that hazardous cigarette fumes wafting off moviegoers can degrade air quality. Those pollutants include the carcinogen benzene (SN: 4/26/13) and toxic aldehydes, such as acrolein, formaldehyde and acetaldehyde (SN: 7/27/16). Such thirdhand smoke, released from tobacco residue on people’s skin, hair and clothing, is an important public health concern, researchers report online March 4 in Science Advances. But it’s not yet clear whether the exposure levels seen in this experiment are enough to cause serious health problems, or how much people can protect themselves from thirdhand smoke in public (SN: 11/10/14). The experiment took place in a well-ventilated, nonsmoking theater in Mainz, Germany, which showed four to five films per day. Over four days, the researchers used a mass spectrometer to take a chemical inventory of pollutants exiting the theater’s ceiling vents. About this story Why are we doing...