‘Third-hand smoke’ is getting traction

New research out of the U.S.’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is said to have found that the residue from smoking indoors—so-called “third-hand smoke”—has the potential to cause cancer, according to a Fox News story.

Bo Hang, of the Lawrence Berkeley laboratory, found that when nicotine in secondhand smoke reacted with nitrous acid in the air, it created new compounds called nitrosamines.

Hang is said to have discovered that these nitrosamines can bond to human DNA in a way that damages genes and gives rise to the potential for cells to become cancerous.

But at least one observer was being cautious about the findings.

“Knowing how much carcinogens stay in a room when someone has been smoking in it, I think it is possible that third-hand smoke may increase one’s risk of cancer,” Suzaynn Schick, an expert on the effects of tobacco, based at the University of California, San Francisco, told Fox News.