Smoke damage to baby insidious

Pregnant women who smoke will not see the invisible damage they are inflicting on their babies, a medical expert said yesterday.

Dr Lesley McCowan, an associate professor at Auckland University's Department of Obstetrics, said smoking mothers produced lighter babies often with problems that were not obvious.

"It is not like having a stamp on your hands or a typical facial appearance," she said.

"That is the mild end of the spectrum. At the severe end are women who have babies who are born too early to survive or who have stillborn babies."

Dr McCowan made her comments during the first New Zealand forum on fetal tobacco syndrome.

The forum was told that the effects of smoking on an unborn baby were "pretty horrific", and that more than 18,000 babies were exposed to poisonous tobacco chemicals and smoke in the womb each year.

"Cigarettes have an effect at a cellular level ... and that is part of the syndrome," she said.

"It doesn't necessarily cause visible structural changes in the baby, but the effects are there for every women who smokes."

Dr McCowan said it was not well known in the community and among some medical people how much an unborn fetus could be harmed by a smoking mother.

Unborn babies could also be damaged by second-hand smoke, even if the mother did not smoke.

She said the forum was trying to increase the awareness of the harm smoking mothers did to their unborn babies, but that had to be done with additional support for women who wanted to give up smoking.

She said nicotine was one of the most addictive substances known, but if a mother stopped smoking early in her pregnancy she could remove the risk to her unborn baby.

Programmes were available throughout the country but they needed more funding to reach more people.

World toll
* In 2000, 1.4 million cancer deaths, or more than one in every five cancer deaths worldwide, were caused by smoking.
* Of these, 1.18 million were among men and 0.24 million among women.
* A total of 625,000 smoking-caused cancer deaths occurred in the developing world and 794,000 in industrialised regions.
* Lung cancer is by far the most noticeable cancer caused by smoking, with 850,000 or 71 per cent of all lung cancer deaths caused by smoking.
- source World Health Organisation

- NZPA