Tobacco smoking not only affects the smoker themselves, but all the other people experiencing passive smoking. A group especially vulnerable to negative health outcomes, as well as to a decreased quality of life are a large group of non-smokers exposed during a critical period of development: the unborn child.

Die massive Gesundheitsgefährdung, die von Tabakrauch ausgeht, beschränkt sich nicht auf das rauchende Individuum alleine. Rauchen führt durch den emittierten Passivrauch auch für Nichtraucher zu Gesundheitsrisiken. Und es gefährdet in besonderem Maße sowohl die Gesundheit als auch spätere Lebensqualität ­einer sehr großen Gruppe von Nichtrauchern, die diesem Risiko in einer besonders kritischen Entwicklungsphase völlig schutzlos ausgeliefert sind: der Ungeborenen.

The authors’ recent article about smoking behaviour during pregnancy addresses a serious public health problem.1 Aside from risks for the fetus and the mother, smoking is also considered to be a major risk for the woman’s husband and her children in the highrisk group of multiparous women. It is necessary to analyse the relationship between parity and smoking to identify those factors that influence the smoking behaviour of multiparous women. A recent review summarized prior studies on the stable and almost linear relationship between multiparity and smoking. Possible causes for this strong association remain to be identified, but several hypotheses are given below.

Previous studies by us and others established that mammary tumors induced by murine mammary tumor virus (MuMTV) could be prevented to various extents by prior vaccination with MuMTV-containing or subviral component immunogens. In this report, four predicted surface-accessible peptide regions (EP-1 to EP-4) of the major viral envelope glycoprotein (gp52) of C3H-MuMTV were tested as carrier-conjugated vaccines for the protection of Balb/c mice against a live virus challenge. With tumor incidence as an endpoint, vaccination with one of these synthetic peptides (EP-3) resulted in a significant reduction in the frequency of early onset tumors and 67% of the test animals remained tumor-free for the entire observation period (16 months). In contrast, only marginal protection was obtained by immunization with the intact glycoprotein (gp52). Immunologic interference may explain the lower protective efficacy of gp52, as compared to EP-3.