Smoking In America, smoking is a pressing problem. Many times, teenagers become hooked, and then continue smoking throughout their adult life. Most everyone has seen the Surgeon General's warning saying that lighting up could cause lung cancer and other health problems for the smoker. There is a new focus on how smoking can affect the next, unborn generation. Dr. Bu-Tian Ji has conducted research in China which shows the connection between a father's smoking and childhood cancer.
China is a nation in which men smoke more than women.
The team concluded that the children of men who had smoked at any point in their lives were thirty percent more likely to have cancer than children of fathers who didn't smoke. Past smoking habits still seemed to affect the health of the child, so the hypothesis was made that perhaps the environment of the sperm is damaged by male smoking, causing possible damage to fresh sperm, or hindering the body's ability to protect the new sperm. Dr. Ji's study did not include the possibility of the culprit being second hand smoke inhaled by the mother, but other studies have shown that the rate of cancer was not affected when it only was the mother who smoked. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe that the sperm may be the cause of this health problem. Like alcohol and other drugs, cigarettes harm the human body.