THE PROBLEMS OF PASSIVE SMOKING WITHIN CHILDREN´S POPULATION

Passive smoking, whose basis is inhalation of smoke produced by other persons, is sometimes also termed as the enforced smoking or as the explosion of air containing a tobacco smoke. In case of children there are formed the condition for origin of asthma, disease of respiratory track, inflammation of the middle ear, syndrome of sudden death in case of newly born babies and other diseases. Although the undesirable effects of passive smoking has been known for a long time, according to the researches more than forty percent of children have been still exposed to them. The aim of this diploma thesis was to map the situation within the selected sample of children´s population, to ascertain to what extent the children are exposed to cigarette´s smoke, what is the level of their awareness of health consequences of passive smoking, what is their relation to active smoking and if this relation is affected by the fact, where and how they are exposed to passive smoking. For the purpose of the research there were determined two hypotheses. The former one assumed that most of children did not realize the principal harmful effects of passive smoking. However, from the evaluation of the results of the questionnaire survey it implied that 90 % of children were able to name correctly the harmful effects of cigarette´s smoke and 91 % thought that passive smoking was detrimental to their health. The latter assumption was that in case of the children being exposed to passive smoking there is a higher risk to become the active smokers. This hypothesis was not completely verified. The percentage of children, who have repeated the experience in smoking, was in the group, whose parents are smokers, lower. On the contrary these children, who are friends with a smoker, more often carried out experiments with a cigarette. In addition to the diploma thesis mentions the results of the pilot study performed in 1996 in the Czech Republic within the project {\clqq}Smoking and me``, which devotes to problems of passive smoking and also selected ascertainment of the study named The Global Youth Tobacco Survey (GYTS) of 2002