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Action on Smoking and Health
A National Legal-Action Antismoking Organization Entirely Supported by Tax-Deductible Contributions
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Most of the levels detected were higher than those found in 10 smoke-free restaurants, 10 eating establishments with smoking sections, and outdoors during the eight-hour test on a Saturday evening in January.
"There is a measurable line that goes from smoke-free restaurants to smoking restaurants to the bar," said Dr. Joel Dunnington, an associate professor at M.D. Anderson. "The bar is really out there."
The results, requested by the Houston Chronicle, have not been reviewed by other scientists. But they come as the city is weighing a nonsmoking ordinance that would ban smoking in indoor dining areas but allow it in bars and restaurants with bars.
On Tuesday, at a public session before the City Council, about 29 people requested a full ban on smoking.
Dunnington's research, one of the first local studies on the chemicals released from smoking indoors, lends some scientific support to an all-out ban.
The concentration of benzene, a carcinogen, was twice as high in bars as outside and in smoke-free restaurants. Bars had nearly five times more methyl ethyl ketone, which can irritate the eyes, nose and throat, than outside, and twice as much methyl ethyl ketone than smoke-free restaurants. Some of the other compounds, such as limonene and pinene, which could come from scented cleaners, were not higher in bars and are not harmful.
"This gives you an obvious reason not to exclude bars," said Dunnington, who paid for the research with part of a $35,000 grant he received from M.D. Anderson for smoking prevention.
Mayor defends his actions
"I'm the first mayor in awhile to put this issue on the council agenda. So I'm neither neglecting nor ignoring science. No one doubts secondhand smoke or alcohol are bad."
Secondhand smokeCouncilwoman Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, however, equated secondhand smoke to Houston's air pollution problem.
"The concentrations are comparable, or may even exceed the concentrations in the industrial neighborhoods the mayor is targeting" for high levels of toxic pollution, said Sekula-Gibbs.
"This is tremendously important information and it is clear to the public, to the scientists and physicians that we have to do something."
Dunnington said it's easier to protect people's health from smoking than from the area's industrial emissions.
"We can clean up the indoor air where Houstonians spend 90 percent of their time in 30 days, with $10,000 to print smoke-free environment signs to go on the businesses," he said. "To clean up the outdoor air is going to cost millions of dollars."
Restaurant industry representatives point to a 2000 study by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory showing that some of the 4,000 chemicals in secondhand smoke were lower than in some previous studies that put air monitors on bartenders and waitresses.
Dunnington said that Oak Ridge Laboratory, while run by the government, also conducts privately funded research. One of the lab's past employers has been the tobacco industry.
But not all smoke-filled restaurants and bars are the same. The size of the place, how many people are smoking, the quality of its ventilation system and how often people leave and enter will all affect the concentration of chemicals in indoor air.
Generally, concentrations of many pollutants are higher indoors because there is less air inside than out.
Dunnington was careful during his study not to place the monitors near kitchens, which can release some of the same chemicals as cigarette smoke. Still, there are many other sources of the chemicals — such as cleaners and varnishes — in restaurants and bars that could have contributed to his readings.
Similar studies elsewhereIn the fall of 2004, the Harris County Health Department's Tobacco Prevention and Cessation Department conducted a small sampling in area bars and restaurants.
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