Parents who smoke often open a window or turn on a fan to clear the air for their children, but experts now have identified a relative threat to children's health that isn't as easy to get rid of: third-hand smoke.(1)____ That's the term being used to describe the invisible yet toxic mixture (2)____ of gas and particlesclinging to smokers' hair and (3)____clothing, not mention cushions and carpeting, that linger long after (4)____second-hand smoke has cleared from a room. The reminder includes heavy metals and radioactive(5)____ materials that young children can get on their hands and ingest, especially if they're crawling or playing on the floor.
Doctors from Mass General Hospital for Children in Boston coined the term "third-hand smoke" to describe these chemicals in a new study that focused on the risks they pose to infants and children. The study was published in latest issue of the journal Pediatrics.(6)____ "Everyone knows that second-hand smoke is bad, but they don't know about this," said Dr. Jonathan P. Winickoff, (7)____the leaded author of the study and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. "When your kids are out of the house, they might smoke.(8)____ Or they smoke in the car. Or they strap the kid in the car seat in the back and crack the window and smoke, and they think it's okay so (9)____the second-hand smoke isn't getting to their kids," Dr. Winickoff continued. "We needed a term to describe these tobacco toxins that aren't invisible."(10)____