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Ocean Springs aldermen took no action this week on a request for an anti-smoking ordinance. The Mississippi Press reports that Kellie Lamb, the health promotions coordinator for Mississippi Tobacco Free Coalition for Jackson County, told aldermen that being smoke-free means smoking would not be allowed in public places.

Lamb says 52 cities in Mississippi already have adopted ordinances to go smoke-free. Alderman Matt McDonnell says Lamb should visit businesses that still permit smoking and talk to the owners. He says there are likely some businesses who want people to be able to smoke inside. The Mississippi State Health Department is offering grants to cities that want to go 100 percent smoke-free. Lamb says Ocean Springs would be eligible for a $5,000 grant.

The same tobacco leaves that kill hundreds of thousands of smokers every year may hold the key to preventing Parkinson’s disease, according to new research from the University of Louisville. University researchers say their findings stem from the puzzling question of why smoking appears to lower the risk for developing the devastating brain disorder. The answer involves the tobacco mosaic virus, or TMV, which attacks plants such as tobacco, said Dr. Robert Friedland, a clinical and research neurologist at the University of Louisville.

The TMV apparently causes antibodies that “may be protective against Parkinson’s,” Friedland said by telephone from Granada, Spain, where he spoke about his findings last week at the International Congress on Autoimmunity. “No one has documented before that people have antibodies to TMV.” Friedland said he hopes the finding will lead to a preventive vaccine against Parkinson’s. Friedland’s research comes after dozens of studies showing that smokers have a reduced risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. Dr. Honglei Chen, an investigator with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health, said there have been more than 60 studies on the link.

But Chen, Friedland and others cautioned that the research shouldn’t be used as an excuse to smoke. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, smoking increases by two to four times the risk of coronary heart disease and stroke. And people who smoke are 15 to 30 times more likely than nonsmokers to get lung cancer or die from it. Heart disease and cancer are two of the nation’s biggest killers, whereas Chen said Parkinson’s strikes about 1 percent of seniors 65 and older. “The adverse effect of smoking is enormous,” Chen said. “Smoking raises the risk of cardiovascular disease; it affects lung health. The risk definitely outweighs the potential benefit.”

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For more than three decades, researchers have warned of the potential health risks associated with tobacco smoke exposure, especially among children whose parents smoke. Now, a new study conducted by researchers from the University of Arizona reports that these effects can persist into adulthood. "This study shows that exposure to parental smoking increases the risk of persistence of respiratory symptoms from childhood into adulthood independent of personal smoking," said Juliana Pugmire, MPH, DrPH., research specialist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

"Persistent respiratory illness in childhood and young adulthood could indicate an increased risk of chronic respiratory illness and lung function deficits in later life," she stated. Although a significant proportion of children throughout the world are exposed to ETS, primarily as a result of their parents' smoking, there is little information regarding the long-term effects of that exposure, Dr. Pugmire noted. "Earlier studies established a link between parental smoking and childhood respiratory illness, but in this study, we sought to demonstrate whether these effects persisted into adulthood," she said.

"A handful of studies examined whether children exposed to parental smoking had asthma that developed or persisted in adulthood but most did not find an association. "We examined asthma as well as other respiratory symptoms and found that exposure to parental smoking had the strongest association with cough and chronic cough that persisted into adult life," she continued. "Exposure to parental smoking also had effects, although weaker, on persistent wheezing and asthma in adulthood," she added. The researchers drew data from the Tucson Epidemiological Study of Airway Obstructive Disease (TESAOD), a large, population-based, prospective study initiated in 1972 that enrolled 3,805 individuals from 1,655 households in the Tucson area in an effort to assess prevalence rates and risk factors of respiratory and other chronic diseases.

Participants were asked to complete questionnaires that were issued every two years until 1996. For this study, the researchers used data from 371 individuals who were enrolled in the TESAOD as children. "We identified individuals who entered the TESAOD study when they were under 15 years of age and who were followed to adulthood during the study. When we collected data from the child participants, we also collected information about the parents' smoking status," Dr. Pugmire said. Dr. Pugmire and her colleagues looked at the reported prevalence of active asthma, wheeze, cough and chronic cough, which was defined as a persistent cough that had occurred for three consecutive months.

They then divided the data into four categories: never, which included individuals who had not reported that symptom during childhood or adulthood; incident, which included individuals who had never reported the symptom in childhood, but had reported at least one incident in adulthood; remittent, including participants who reported at least one incident in childhood and none in adulthood; and persistent, which included individuals who had at least one report of a symptom during both childhood and adulthood. Once the data were collected, the researchers determined that 52.3 percent of children included in the current study were exposed to ETS between birth and 15 years. After adjusting for sex, age, years of follow-up and personal smoking status, the researchers found that ETS exposure in childhood was significantly associated with several persistent respiratory symptoms, including persistent wheeze, cough and chronic cough.

"Persistent wheezing from childhood into adult life has been shown to be associated with lung function deficits. Chronic bronchitis (defined as chronic cough and phlegm) is a significant risk factor for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) development later in life. Therefore, the persistence of symptoms like chronic cough and wheeze into young adulthood may indicate a susceptibility to lung function deficits and chronic respiratory illness with age," Dr. Pugmire noted. Future studies will be needed to examine the potential synergistic effects of personal smoking and exposure to parental smoking on risk of COPD morbidity and mortality in middle to late adult life, she added.