Deadly Habit: Majority of families seemingly prefer cigarettes over healthy children

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What goes in must come out. Bad for health on both sides.

The sitting room at the Hakobyans home became a chamber of smoke when the family’s grandfather and father returned from work. Lighting cigarette after cigarette, the men of the family tried to get rest in the evening through their favorite habit.

“This smoke is useful,” grandfather, 60-year-old Gurgen Hakobyan tries to persuade. “It is not at all harmful for the children. Smoke kills every harmful thing in the air, removes it…”

However, when three-year-old Narek Hakobyan began to feel bad periodically and get choked from late night coughing fits, the boy’s mother understood that the matter was serious and turned to specialists for help.

The three-year-old was diagnosed as having bronchial asthma.

“It isn’t quite a usual phenomenon for a three-year-old child, it is more typical to say a pre-bronchial condition that was rarely seen in the past,” says therapist and lung specialist Anna Hovhannisyan. “However, during recent years the number of respiratory and allergic diseases has increased in the republic so much that it seems that nothing should be a surprise.”

Statistics and the real situation, though, do leave room for surprise.

According to statistics of the Health Ministry of Armenia, the number of respiratory diseases increased by 45 percent from 2001 to 2005.

During the four year period between those surveys, the number of those suffering from respiratory diseases increased from 119,550, to 161,045. The dramatic increase could be an indication that more people are applying for treatment, thus more cases of illness across the board generally. If so, however, it would contradict the general trend of people putting off practice, as many in the republic still cannot afford proper treatment, to say nothing of preventative care. More troubling is the possibility that air is getting worse and immune systems are getting weaker. And, of course, the omnipresence of cigarette smoke republic-wide.

According to Armenia’s chief lung specialist, director of the republic’s Speliotherapy and “Asthma Center” Andranik Voskanyan, the real number of people suffering from these diseases is higher even than that recorded officially.

“Although the number of people turning to doctors declines from year to year, however in the past 10 years the number of respiratory diseases and especially asthma diseases has increased in Armenia at least twofold,” Voskanyan says. “And the number of child patients has also increased.”

According to the chief specialist, while a few years ago the youngest child suffering from asthma was five or six years old, then during the last few years the disease is found also with one-to-two-year-old infants.

“This is the reaction of the human organism to the environment. The organism does not catch up to the pace of changes in the environment in struggling with them and adapting itself,” he says. “Environmental pollution, car emissions and other factors contribute to the origin of the disease.”

Among “other factors” that cause asthma among children, according to World Health Organization (WHO), is second hand smoking.

Statistics show that nearly 65 percent of men and 3.5 percent of women are officially considered as smokers in Armenia. However, according to specialists, the figure is higher than the official number.

According to WHO’s data, cigarette smoke first of all harms children.

According to the WHO studies, children who inhale air “rich” in cigarette smoke are several times more likely to develop asthma, bronchitis, pneumonia and other respiratory diseases.

“Our studies among 5,000 children who attend first to third grades at schools in [Yerevan’s] Shengavit district showed that there is a smoker in the families of nearly 73 percent of those diagnosed with asthma,” Voskanyan says.

Despite the high index, “Humanitarian Foundation” president and founder of the Center for Quitting Smoking doctor David Petrosyan says that nevertheless, a majority of the population does not treat seriously the destructive consequences of smoking.

Air polluting tobacco smoke, according to specialists, contains more than 4,000 chemical substances some of which cause respiratory, cardio-vascular, cancer and other diseases and complications.

“Children find themselves in the most defenseless situation in this sense. They cannot protest or demand that their parents should not poison the air,” Petrosyan says. “Unfortunately, some parents understand it only when their child’s health deteriorates and they begin to go to see different doctors. Although in many cases even in that situation many do not realize it and prefer lying on a sofa and enjoying their narcotic.”