Secondhand Smoke Study Gets to Heart of the Matter

Between 3,000 and 4,000 Americans who are not smokers die of lung cancer each year because of long-term exposure to secondhand smoke. Now the largest study of its kind ever conducted finds that as many as 60,000 heart attack deaths a year in nonsmokers can similarly be attributed to passive smoking. The link between heart disease and secondhand smoke has been known for some time. The new study establishes that the level of risk from such regular exposure is far higher than thought. It is one more powerful scientifically based argument for banning all smoking in the workplace, including restaurants, bars and airliners.

The 10-year study, run by the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and the Harvard School of Public Health, tracked 32,000 nurses between the ages of 36 and 61 who never smoked and who at the beginning of the study did not have heart disease or cancer. By the time the study ended in 1992, 152 women had had heart attacks, 25 of them fatal. Those in the study who reported regular exposure to cigarette smoke at home or at work were nearly twice as likely to develop heart disease as women who were not so exposed. Women who said they were only occasionally exposed to secondhand smoke were also put at a significantly elevated risk. The authors of the study emphasize that its key findings apply to men as well as women.

Dr. Stanton Glantz of UC San Francisco, who has just been named to the state’s Tobacco Research and Oversight Committee, is among the pioneer researchers on the link between secondhand smoke and heart disease. Among other effects, he has shown, exposure to the hundreds of chemicals in tobacco smoke damages arteries, reduces the body’s ability to use oxygen and can encourage the formation of heart attack-triggering blood clots. Thanks to the nurses’ study, we now also know how unexpectedly extensive are the health risks that passive smoking represents.

The question of whether smoking should be permitted in the workplace has been answered inconsistently; it is banned in some cities and states, allowed in others. But as mounting evidence makes clear, this is a public health issue of first importance and not a matter to be left to local option. What’s needed, what the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has proposed but not implemented, is a national ban on workplace smoking. Pending class-action lawsuits, filed among others by airline cabin attendants who are exposed to tobacco smoke on overseas flights, could speed the day when a full ban is imposed.

Since 1994 California has prohibited smoking in virtually all closed workplaces. A temporary exemption was given to bars and taverns. A bill now before the Assembly Rules Committee, AB 297, would extend that exemption indefinitely. It would, in other words, permit the continued, involuntary poisoning of nonsmoking workers and customers. The newest evidence that secondhand smoke is an indiscriminate killer underscores the absurdity of continuing this exemption.