Madam, - What is it about the workplace smoking ban that makes some otherwise intelligent people apparently lose their reason, objectivity and common sense? Why do people who really should know better equate health promotion with hellish persecution?
Maurice Neligan (Health Supplement, April 5th) derides the "smoke police, drink police, fat police" and other alleged "lunatics" supposedly intent on "possessing the asylum". Mr Neligan, cardiac surgeon and health services oracle, assures us that "moderation in all things" - including smoking, apparently - improves one's "chances of extending useful and pleasurable life". Unfortunately, we will have to wait for his definition of moderation in smoking before we take up the habit for the good of our health.
As a surgeon, Mr Neligan seems an unlikely supporter of smoking, moderate or otherwise. As a smoker, Desmond Fennell (April 12th) at least has a compelling personal reason for opposing the workplace ban, even though he purports to argue about evidence. Mr Fennell claims that in Ireland certain "powerful non-smoking élites" are engaging in "persecution of smokers". Their tone is "harsh" and "puritanically aggressive", and they are motivated by a belief in "what seems a lie to most people", by "figures. . .grasped out of the air" and by "what they read in the newspapers".
"Open-minded" and "eager for the truth", Mr Fennell bases his assertions on a number of newspaper articles and on the "observable fact" that in countries where cafés, bars or restaurants continue to provide spaces for smokers and non-smokers, "the number of people in the smoking section far exceeds the number in the non-smoking area". Mr Fennell may be so open-minded that his brain could be in danger of falling out. Oddly, he doesn't seem to have asked himself why committed non-smokers might be avoiding such places. Perhaps it's because, unlike Mr Fennell, they got the idea long ago that a non-smoking area in a confined space makes as much sense as a non-urination area in a swimming pool.
If Mr Fennell, clearly no mean reader of newspapers himself, spent less time focusing on newspaper headlines and more time consulting scientific journals he would see that, despite the efforts of tobacco corporations and the protestations of some indefatigable smokers, there is a substantial and growing body of medical evidence and opinion regarding the harmful effects of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS).
For example, Peter Whincup, professor of cardiovascular epidemiology at St George's Hospital Medical School in London, and colleagues last year published the results of a 20-year follow-up study of 4,729 men participating in the British regional heart study (British Medical Journal, June 2004). Using a baseline biochemical marker of passive exposure to smoking (as opposed to self-reported recall of exposure) these researchers showed that passive smoking is associated with an excess risk of coronary heart disease in non-smokers, and concluded that such exposure is "a public health hazard" whose effects "may have been underestimated in previous studies".
Reviewing this and several other epidemiological studies of ETS, Prof Konrad Jamrosik of the University of Queensland recently concluded that Irish-style workplace smoking restrictions could prevent at least "several hundred premature deaths each year" in the UK (British Medical Journal, April 9th).
In decades to come we might well be looking back on smoking as an historical oddity, and I hope we will recognise Mícheál Martin's legislation as an ethical, evidence-based public health measure of great significance. - Yours, etc.,
SIMON COMER,
Rahoon,
Galway.