Researchers found that children whose parents had difficulty coping are far more likely to develop asthma than the offspring of parents whose lives hold less stress.
Early stress is thought to damage children's immune systems.
In it's quest to demonize smoking and smokers, anti-tobacco has been shameless in fastening onto any health phenomenon and tagging it as caused by tobacco. The bogus link between secondhand smoke and asthma is particularly inane since both childhood and adult asthma rates have increased dramatically during the period in which smoking rates declined. Researchers at Leicester University rightly reject tobacco smoke as a cause and pose an intriguing theory that today's hyper-paranoia about health may play a part in the huge numbers of those suffering from asthma. The incidence of viral wheeze, the response to a virus infection, rose from nine per cent to 19 per cent. The rise in respiratory problems could not be linked to household risk factors such as passive smoking , gas cooking, pets or low parental education attainment because those factors declined over the period, the team reports.