Concealed Risks
If you’re the parent of a child born with a cleft lip or palate, you know firsthand the emotional and financial costs. This developmental injury requires extensive and expensive medical treatment, surgeries, and ongoing care through teenage years and sometimes beyond.
This is a burden no child and no family should have to bear, but if you or anyone in the home smoked during your pregnancy, unknown to you, those cigarettes were full of pesticides, which are known causes of cleft injuries, and your child was being exposed at every critical moment in their development.
Smoking During Pregnancy: A Known Risk for Cleft Injuries
It might seem that pregnant smokers have been warned. You see warnings against smoking and pregnancy everywhere. Scientific and medical research has established that first-trimester smoking is clearly associated with an increased risk of cleft injuries.
Yet, beyond the general warnings about smoking and pregnancy, were you ever informed about pesticide contamination of the cigarettes you were smoking and the danger they presented to your child? Was there ever any discussion of steps you could take other than quitting to reduce the risks of pesticide exposure to your child, like switching to a pesticide-free cigarette?
As the result of decades of sophisticated propaganda, doctors automatically associate smoking-related birth injuries, disease and death with tobacco and never question what might happen if that tobacco weren’t contaminated with pesticides. This is beyond tragic, because it blinds them to a very real potential solution to smoking-related disease that could affect literally millions of families.
Inhaling Pesticides During Pregnancy: The Concealed Risk
Multiple studies show that pesticide exposure of any kind is strongly linked to the development of nonsyndromic cleft lip and palate (NSCL/P). And there’s the problem with smoking – right there. Neither doctors nor parents are aware of the unregulated, virtually concealed pesticides in commercial tobacco products – pesticides that are specifically associated with damage to developing human fetal life.
Check these data:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08958378.2022.2037791
What the Research Says
Multiple studies have shed light on both sides of the pesticide-smoking-cleft connection:
Pesticide Exposure & Cleft Risk: A study conducted in Xinjiang Province, China, found that maternal pesticide exposure was strongly linked to the occurrence of NSCL/P. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32924548/
Maternal Smoking & Oral Clefts: Research has established that first-trimester smoking is clearly associated with an increased risk of oral clefts in newborns. https://journals.lww.com/epidem/abstract/2008/07000/maternal_smoking_and_oral_clefts__the_role_of.17.aspx
The Lack of Warnings: Who Should Be Accountable?
Were you ever informed that, as you can see, nearly all commercial cigarettes expose smokers to pesticide residues? More importantly, were you ever made aware that there are pesticide-free tobacco options available that reduce harm from smoking by eliminating pesticide exposure? Did you ever see any Surgeon General’s warnings about inhaling pesticides from smoking? Note: you didn’t, because the Surgeon General, for some reason, has never mentioned pesticides in all their 50 years of propaganda about smoking.
Few if any American doctors are aware of pesticide contamination of cigarettes, nor are they aware that there has never been a single study of the health effects of smoking pesticide-free tobacco. So every doctor in America warns pregnant women against smoking but not one of them thinks of suggesting any smoking alternative except quitting. They certainly wouldn’t ever recommend the one thing that a smoking mother could actually do to reduce the potential harm to her child – switch to pesticide-free cigarettes.
So the question arises: do tobacco manufacturers have the responsibility to warn pregnant consumers about the avoidable risks associated with pesticide exposure from their contaminated products?
Beyond the manufacturers, does the U.S. Surgeon General have a duty to alert pre-pregnancy and expecting mothers and fathers to this additional and avoidable smoking-related risk to their children? The Surgeon General goes on and on about the dangers of smoking – but never mentions the known dangers that can be avoided by an informed smoker. Deciding to switch to a pesticide-free brand is a lot easier than deciding to quit, and a lot more likely to succeed and spare the developing child exposure to known life-altering toxins.
And beyond them all there’s the US Congress, who have been completely in the pockets of the tobacco industry for generations, and who have watched complacently as 500,000 Americans a year have died (very profitably) from smoking, or more specifically from inhaling pesticide-contaminated tobacco smoke.
Moving Forward: Awareness and Advocacy
As parents, consumers, and advocates for public health, it’s essential to call for greater transparency from both regulatory bodies and corporations. Families deserve access to the full spectrum of risk information so they can make the best decisions for their children’s health. The presence of pesticides in tobacco products has been actively concealed by the tobacco industry and federal regulators and legislators for decades – accountability is long overdue. Blanket warnings against smoking are pure concealment when those making the warnings understand and fail to make clear that there is a path to measurable effective harm reduction for smokers by choosing pesticide-free tobacco products.
Have you or someone you know been affected by these deliberately concealed risks? Share this information and help spread awareness – because only knowledge will give us the power to save our children.
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