Sitting in the no-smoking section of a café does not protect non-smokers from the ill-effects of passive smoking, new research has found.
The study, on the impact of passive smoking on children, recommends that the limited effectiveness of ventilation in reducing exposure to tobacco smoke in enclosed places should be more widely publicised.
Its author, Mr Maurice Mulcahy, a senior environmental health officer with the Western Health Board, said in his report: "While we have partial restrictions in our restaurants and cafés (50 per cent of seating to be no-smoking), these merely serve to concentrate smokers together, while the tobacco smoke ignores the signs and drifts into adjoining no-smoking areas."
His study, entitled Children and Environmental Tobacco Smoke, set out to quantify the exposure to passive smoking of 164 boys and girls aged 12 and 13 at three Galway secondary schools. He also attempted to identify the settings in which they were exposed to tobacco smoke.
He found that all the children had been exposed to environmental tobacco smoke over the preceding two to three days, even though half of them had no recollection of such exposure.
Smoking in the home by parents accounted for most of the exposure while the most prevalent locations for exposure outside the home were restaurants (10 per cent) and cars (9.2 per cent).
Mr Mulcahy measured exposure by taking saliva samples from the children. He analysed these for the presence of cotinine, a chemical produced when the body breaks down nicotine which it has absorbed over the previous two to three days.
Children from homes where both parents smoked had more than five times the cotinine levels of children from homes where neither parent smoked. In homes where mothers only smoked, cotinine levels were twice those of children whose father was the only smoker.
Mr Mulcahy said it was time that parents were made aware of the impact smoking in the the home had on their children. In addition to possible health effects such as asthma, middle-ear infections and cot deaths, it could condition children to accepting smoking as the social norm.
The study, which recommends that smoking be prohibited in all public places to which children have access, also found that 60 per cent of the children thought it was easy to get cigarettes. A number indicated their that parents would supply them.