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“One finding alone does not prove ‘truth,’” said Dr. Gregory Connolly, director of the Tobacco Control Research Program at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the researchers on the study. “But we’re pretty close to it.” Connolly said the findings back up a recent study showing that after Scotland banned smoking in workplaces and enclosed public spaces in 2006, children’s hospital admissions for asthma declined. That study joined earlier ones suggesting health benefits in adults.
A 2009 U.S. government study, for example, found that after the city of Pueblo, Colorado, banned smoking in workplaces and public places,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], heart attack hospitalizations dropped 41 percent in the 18 months after the law went into effect. “I think the key thing is, when we pass policies like this, we are often criticized for not having measurements of the effects,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych],” Connolly said. With the current findings and the earlier studies, he said, “you’re linking policies directly with health effects.” For their investigation, Connolly and his colleagues examined data from a U.S. government health survey conducted between 1999 and 2006.
Parents of 8,800 children between the ages of 3 and 15 answered questions about asthma diagnoses and symptom severity. Overall, 10 percent of the children currently had doctor-diagnosed asthma,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], and 21 percent lived in a county with at least one law banning smoking in workplaces, restaurants or bars. Among kids with asthma, 12 percent of those living in a county without public smoking bans had persistent wheezing symptoms, chronic nighttime cough or were on medication to control wheezing. That figure was 8 percent for kids in smoke-free counties.
When the researchers weighed other factors, like family income, race and whether mothers smoked during pregnancy, children with asthma living in smoke-free counties were one-third less likely to have persistent symptoms than those in other counties. Five years after Washington residents voted to ban smoking cigarettes, cigars and pipes in public places, King County wants to add one more thing to the list: Electronic cigarettes. The 2006 state law banned smoking in bars and restaurants on the basis that second-hand smoke causes cancer and other diseases.
But King County’s rationale for adding e-cigarettes also known as battery-powered nicotine-delivery devices to the list of forbidden acts is a little different. The fake cigs,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], from which users inhale vaporized nicotine, don’t emit smoke. Rather, they produce a less-smelly, combustion-free mist. But public health officials say they’re so similar to the real thing that they make tobacco enforcement difficult and often prompt smokers to think it’s OK to light up in public. And that leads to second-hand smoke, health officials reason.
“The idea is that even though they’re not exactly identical to cigarettes, people see folks using e-cigarettes,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], and they think somebody else is smoking,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych],” said Bud Nicola, a King County Board of Health member and affiliate professor with the University of Washington School of Public Health. “It makes it very difficult for inspectors.”