Secondhand smoke: Report could trigger avalanche of rules
By P. Raeburn - AP Science Editor 1/93

NY - The release of an EPA report that says secondhand smoke kills could trigger an avalanche of federal, state and local restrictions on smoking in public places, health advocates say.

The long-delayed report, to be released Thursday, concludes that cigarette smoke should be classified as a human carcinogen, the same designation given to asbestos, benzene and radon, EPA officials said Tuesday.

The report says that secondhand smoke kills 3,000 Americans each year because of lung cancer and that it also raises the risk of pneumonia and bronchitis in young children.

The EPA has the power to classify a substance a carcinogen but has no authority to regulate indoor air.

However, Dr. Alfred Munzer, a spokesman for the Coalition on Smoking or Health, which includes the American Lung Association, the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society, said, "We believe this will motivate state governments, local governments to enact further regulations."

"Having the EPA's imprimatur on this is extremely important," he said.

Munzer called on President Bush to use the report to restrict smoking in federal buildings. "This is far less controversial than the pardons he has issued and would do a tremendous amount for the public health," he said.

The report could also prod the OSHA to regulate smoking in the workplace, health advocates said.

OSHA spokesman Douglas Fuller said the agency would weigh the report carefully.

The report's authors determined that secondhand smoke causes 400-7,000 lung cancer deaths in Americans each year. They said their best estimate - based on conservative assumptions - is 3,000 deaths.

The EPA researchers also found that cigarette smoke increases the severity and frequency of asthma in young children and increases the risk of a disorder marked by fluid buildup in the middle ear in youngsters.

The EPA has decided to kill a second report that links secondhand smoke to 37,000 heart-disease deaths each year, said Robert Axelrad, head of the EPA's indoor-air division. The report originally was conceived as a companion to the lung-cancer report.

The link between cigarette smoke and heart disease is considered even more explosive than the lung-cancer link because cigarette smoke is blamed for roughly 10 times as many heart-disease as lung-cancer deaths.

The heart association has petitioned the EPA to do its own study of secondhand smoke and heart disease, but Axelrad said the agency has not made a decision.

The lung-cancer report was the focus of a huge lobbying campaign by the tobacco industry and its allies in Congress. They submitted hundreds of pages of documents to the EPA during the past two years in an effort to delay or water down the report.

Despite the attack, the EPA refused to back away from its condemnation of tobacco smoke as a human carcinogen and a dangerous indoor-air pollutant, said EPA officials who worked on the report.

Brennan Dawson, a spokeswoman for the Tobacco Institute, said that despite revisions in the reports, its conclusions were still not supported by existing scientific data.

"Any number of independent world-renowned experts have looked at this report and said the EPA has mischaracterized and manipulated the data," she said.