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• Safer cigarette smoke just as harmful to embryos 

Smoke from so-called harm-reduction cigarettes is just as dangerous to developing embryos as smoke from standard cigarettes, and may be even more toxic, new experiments with mouse embryo stem cells show.

The smoke issuing from the ends of these cigarettes is more harmful than the fumes inhaled through a filter, Dr. Prue Talbot of the University of California, Riverside and her colleagues report in the journal Human Reproduction.

There has been very little research on the chemicals remaining in cigarettes treated to remove certain toxic and cancer-causing substances and even less on how smoke from these cigarettes might affect developing embryos, Talbot told Reuters Health. "The caveat is there are many things in smoke besides the known carcinogens -- smoke has somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 chemicals in it," she said.

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