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Comment by array_key_first | Hacker News Reader

Blowing smoke in someone's face is very little smoke in practice, because air is a thing. Also, realistically, you're not getting cancer from someone blowing smoke in your face.

Smokers get cancer because they smoke tens of thousands of cigarettes. You won't get cancer because you kind of smoked .1 cigarettes. Also, the majority of lifetime smokers don't even get lung cancer.

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Largely because there's so many other tobacco and nicotine related diseases to get instead:

  A full range of scientific evidence, extending from the molecular level to whole populations, supports the conclusion that secondhand smoke causes disease. The scope of this evidence is enormous, and encompasses not only the literature on secondhand smoke but also relevant findings on active smoking and on the toxicity of individual tobacco smoke components.

* The Health Consequences of Involuntary Exposure to Tobacco Smoke: A Report of the Surgeon General. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK44321/

356 links to supporting studies and works

Of course second hand smoke causes disease - we know that. But you have to consider the context in which we attacked that. The second hand smoke they're referring to is nearly constant smoking indoors, which was standard in the past.

Smoking blowing smoke in your face once is one time and outside. It's easily millions of times less smoke exposure than what you're referring to here.

> Smoking blowing smoke in your face once is one time and outside.

You've had a short life with minimal exposure to smokers then.

I haven't, actually, practically my entire family smokes. But it's very different these days. The amount of second hand smoke I'm exposed to is still, realistically, thousands of not millions of times less than that that the average person would be exposed to a few decades ago. Because there's less smoking in general, and of the smoking left it's done outside.

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