Bar workers who smoke also benefit from smoking ban

The health of bar workers, who actively smoke cigarettes, significantly improves after the introduction of a smoking ban, reveals research published ahead of print in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

The findings are based on 371 bar workers from 72 Scottish bars, whose symptoms and lung function were assessed before the implementation of the ban on smoking in enclosed public places, and then two and 12 months afterwards.

In all, 191 workers underwent all three assessments, and the proportion reporting any respiratory symptoms fell from 69% to 57% after one year. The proportion of those with sensory symptoms (runny nose, red eyes, sore throat) also fell from 75% to 64%.

Among non-smokers the proportion of those with phlegm and red eyes fell, respectively, from 32% to 14%, and from 44% to 18%.

But the effects were also seen among those who continued to smoke themselves. The proportions of smokers reporting wheeze fell from almost half (48%) to one in three (31%), and those reporting breathlessness fell from 42% to 29%.

The authors conclude that their findings reinforce the benefits on health of a smoking ban in public places, but they also show that those who continue to smoke also stand to gain.

It is thought that the ban may have boosted the numbers of smokers indulging their habit at home, so exposing their children to greater levels of environmental tobacco smoke. More attention now needs to be paid to this, the authors warn.

Source: British Medical Journal

   

• CarolAST - Feb 11, 2009
  • Rank: not rated yet
  Every smoking ban, everywhere, has been rammed down the public's throat by falsely framing the issue as "freedom versus public health," and CONCEALING ANTI-SMOKER SCIENTIFIC FRAUD.
  
  More than 50 studies have implicated human papillomaviruses as the cause of over 22% of non-small cell lung cancers. This would equal over 30,000 cases, which is more than they are claiming for radon. It's also ten times more lung cancers than the anti-smokers pretend are caused by secondhand smoke. Passive smokers are more likely to have been exposed to this virus, so the anti-smokers' studies, because they are all based on nothing but lifestyle questionnaires, have been cynically DESIGNED to falsely blame passive smoking for all those extra lung cancers that are really caused by HPV. And, it's obvious that a significant proportion of lung cancers blamed on active smoking are actually caused by HPV. Obviously, there is a corrupt, politically-motivated coverup of a far larger cause of lung cancer than radon or secondhand smoke!
  
  http://www.smoker...ungc.htm
  
  The anti-smokers lie that smoking bans supposedly cause "immediate, dramatic" declines in the number of heart attack admissions. In the Pueblo study, what they didn't tell you is that the death rates from acute myocardial infarction actually increased in the year after the ban, the same time they were boasting that the number of admissions declined! That suggests that people were dying because they weren%u2019t admitted to hospitals when they should have been! And in the Indiana study, they exploited an anomalous spike in acute MIs during the "before" section of the study, to make the "after" part look better! And in the Helena study, the actual death rates from acute myocardial infarction (as opposed to hospital admissions which were the endpoint of the study) were nearly identical in 2001 (before the ban) and 2002 (the year of the ban), and reached their lowest point in 2003, the year after the smoking ban was repealed.
  
  http://www.smoker...art.html
  
  If smoking or passive smoking were the real cause of asthma, the rates of asthma would have gone DOWN. But the EPA's own report says, "Between 1980 and 1995, the percentage of children with asthma doubled, from 3.6 percent in 1980 to 7.5 percent in 1995." The graph on pdf page 65 boasts of declines in cotinine levels during this same period.
  
  http://yosemite.e...A-01.pdf
  
  And the CDC says, "Despite the plateau in asthma prevalence, ambulatory care use has continued to grow since 2000... Increased ambulatory care use for asthma has continued during an era when overall rate of ambulatory care use for children did not increase."
  
  http://www.cdc.go...d381.pdf
  
  This is a classic example of how the slimy and unscrupulous manipulators of public opinion have railroaded the world into tyranny!
  
  • report abuse
  • • Current rank
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5
• randalyons - Feb 11, 2009
  • Rank: not rated yet
  Obviously you are not a bar worker!
  • report abuse
  • • Current rank
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5