Smoking has been known to mankind for centuries, but it is only in recent decades that much attention has been paid to the harmfulness of this habit.
Mercury inhalation is particularly dangerous in this respect and smoking creates extremely favorable conditions for the emission and targeted delivery of this
element into the lungs. Despite this fact, a lack of a clear method for estimating the exposure of tobacco consumers to
mercury was identified. This work shows justification to transfer the approach of estimating food product consumers' exposure to estimate the exposure of combustible tobacco product consumers to this
element. In addition, it was noted that researchers' attention is mainly focused on cigarettes, while the tobacco market has a wide range of combustible products. Therefore, in this work, the
mercury content of cigars (8.45 ± 0.18-41.02 ± 0.20 μg/kg), pipe tobaccos (8.03 ± 0.52-25.48 ± 0.50 μg/kg), bidis (14.93 ± 0.47-31.79 ± 0.26 μg/kg) and cigarette tobaccos (14.22 ± 0.71-34.5 ± 1.4 μg/kg) was analyzed. This study demonstrates that smoking can contribute significant total
mercury exposure to consumers', although it is unlikely to cause
mercury poisoning regardless of other exposure sources.