New Studies "Blow Away Smoke" [10/17-2]

Two new studies reportedly blow away any doubts about the risks of secondhand tobacco smoke according to a report in Reuters News Service.

Here are excerpts:

Studies Blow Away Doubts About Passive Smoking

Two medical studies showing that passive smoking increases the risk of heart disease and lung cancer have blown away any lingering doubts about the dangers, the British Medical Association said Friday.

``The new evidence published by the British Medical Journal shows that living with a smoker is a major health hazard,'' Dr. Bill O'Neill, the science and research adviser for the BMA, said in a statement.

``The tobacco industry must now stop its pathetic attempts to evade the evidence and accept that cigarettes not only harm and kill those who smoke them, they harm and kill non-smokers too.''

Dr. Malcolm Law of the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine in London analyzed 19 published studies involving 6,600 people about the risk of heart disease for a non-smoker living with a smoker.

He found that people who have never smoked have an estimated 30 percent greater chance of developing heart disease if they live with a smoker.

``This is surprisingly large -- almost half the risk of smoking 20 cigarettes per day even though the exposure is only one percent of that of a smoker,'' said Law.

``Breathing other people's smoke is an important and avoidable cause of ischemic heart disease, increasing a person's risk by a quarter,'' he added.

In a separate study also from the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Allan Hackshaw said 37 studies showed that passive smoking raised a non-smoker's chance of getting lung cancer by 26 percent.

The risk for the non-smoker rose with the number of cigarettes their partner smoked and the number of years they lived together.

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