What About The Workers?

Too often in the smoke-free debate, the health and right to breathe clean air of workers is forgotten. The workplace remains a major source of exposure to secondhand smoke and the vast majority of workers are unprotected. 

A recent study, released last year, sheds more light on the subject.

From Science Daily: Offering alarming new evidence on the dangers of permitting smoking in the workplace, scientists have found that nonsmoking restaurant and bar employees absorb a potent carcinogen--not considered safe at any level--while working in places where they had to breathe tobacco smoke from customers and co-workers.

The carcinogen, NNK, is found in the body only as a result of using tobacco or breathing secondhand smoke. 

In a study published in the August 2007 edition of the American Journal of Public Health, investigators at the Multnomah County Health Department and Oregon Department of Human Services report that elevated levels of NNK showed up in the urine of nonsmoking employees shortly after they encountered secondhand smoke during their shifts. Moreover, levels of NNK, which is known to cause lung cancer, increased by 6 percent for each hour of work.

"This is the first study to show increases in NNK as a result of a brief workplace exposure, and that levels of this powerful carcinogen continue to increase the longer the person works in a place where smoking is permitted. NNK is a major cancer causing agent from tobacco products--and workers should not have to be exposed to any dose of this very dangerous chemical," said Michael Stark, PhD, of the Multnomah County Health Department and the study's lead author.

"The science shows that the threat of disease from secondhand smoke is no longer a distant threat. The amount of this carcinogen increases even within a single work shift."

The investigators also note that their research supports the notion that the risks of secondhand tobacco smoke in the workplace are borne disproportionately by an already vulnerable group. Employees who participated in their study are typical of foodservice workers nationwide in that the majority were women, under age 30, had relatively low household incomes, and more than one third of them lacked health insurance.

"This is already a population that tends to have fewer resources to deal with health problems than many other groups so the least we can do is protect them from harmful cigarette smoke," Stark said. "For young women in particular, secondhand smoke can increase the risk of having breast cancer and of giving birth prematurely or having low-birth weight babies."

For more information on the study:  click here