Smokers' germs linked to children's increased colds

SAN FRANCISCO -- Parental smoking is tied to higher rates of colds and ear infections in their offspring, even when the adults don't light up near their children, a study says.

Health officials have long known that children whose parents smoke cigarettes are more likely to get colds, with the assumption being that the smoke somehow made the children sick. A study presented yesterday at a medical meeting in San Francisco suggests the reason for the high rate of infections among children is not so much exposure to smoke as time spent with their parents.

Parents who smoked were seven times as likely to harbor infection-causing bacteria in their throats as their non smoking peers, said Itzhak Brook, a professor of pediatrics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

``It's because smoking damages the mucous membranes" in parents' noses and throats, making them more susceptible to invasion by harmful bacteria, Brook said in a Sept. 21 telephone interview. ``So they get sick a lot, get treated with antibiotics, and are colonized not only with pathogenic bacteria but also with drug-resistant bacteria."

Brook reached this conclusion after taking throat swabs from a group of 80 children and their parents and analyzing them for the presence of harmful bacteria. The study was presented yesterday at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in San Francisco.

In one group of 20 healthy children and their 20 smoking parents, 15 parents and 13 children had harmful bacteria in their noses or throats. Among a similar group of children whose parents did not smoke, three parents and seven children had bad germs.

Brook also looked at children prone to ear infections, with at least three in the previous year. There, the pattern was reversed.

The infection-causing germs could be found in nearly all the children -- not surprising considering their history of earaches. Among the parents, just three of the non smokers harbored the bad bacteria, compared with 17 of the smokers, suggesting the children were infecting parents whose smoking made them vulnerable.

``It's a vicious circle in the family," said Brook. ``There is a sharing of bacteria between parents and children."