Michigan lags in protecting workers from smoke

There have been a lot of letters in The Ann Arbor News over the last couple of months about the proposed Michigan workplace smoking ban, which the Michigan Legislature hasn't passed yet. Many smokers have responded in the blog to these letters, sometimes questioning whether smoking is even bad for your health. Therefore, I feel compelled to present to smokers the stark facts.

Cigarette smoking has been identified as the most important source of preventable disease and illness and premature death worldwide. Smoking-related diseases claim an estimated 438,000 American lives each year, including those affected indirectly, such as babies born prematurely due to prenatal maternal smoking and victims of secondhand exposure to tobacco's carcinogens. Cigarette smoke contains over 4,800 chemicals, 69 of which are known to cause cancer. Smoking is directly responsible for approximately 90 percent of lung cancer deaths. By the way, lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths. My brother-in-law, a smoker for a number of years, died of lung cancer at the young age of 54. My grandfather, also a smoker, died of throat cancer at the age of 62. The list of diseases caused by smoking includes coronary heart disease, stroke, emphysema, and bladder, esophageal, laryngeal, lung, oral, throat, cervical, kidney, stomach, and pancreatic cancers. Smoking is also a major factor in a variety of other conditions and disorders, including high blood pressure and slow healing of wounds.

Every so often I hear smokers talk about some relative of his/hers who smoked and lived to some ripe old age, like 80 or 85. That doesn't prove a thing! There are exceptions to every rule, but smoking does in fact decrease your chance of living a long, healthy life. That is precisely why insurance companies charge smokers substantially higher premiums for life-insurance policies.

Secondhand smoke is a mixture of the smoke given off by the burning end of a cigarette, pipe or cigar and the smoke exhaled from the lungs of smokers. It is involuntarily inhaled by nonsmokers, lingers in the air hours after cigarettes have been extinguished, and can cause or exacerbate a wide range of adverse health effects, including cancer, respiratory infections and asthma. Secondhand smoke causes approximately 3,400 lung cancer deaths and 22,700 to 69,600 heart disease deaths in adult nonsmokers in the United States each year.

Nonsmokers exposed to secondhand smoke at work are at increased risk for adverse health effects. Levels of secondhand smoke in restaurants and bars are two to five times higher than in residences with smokers and two to six times higher than in office workplaces. The current Surgeon General's Report concluded that scientific evidence indicates that there is no risk-free level of exposure to secondhand smoke. Short exposures to secondhand smoke can cause blood platelets to become stickier, damage the lining of blood vessels, decrease coronary flow velocity reserves and reduce heart rate variability, potentially increasing the risk of heart attack.

Workplaces nationwide are going smoke-free to provide clean indoor air and protect employees from the life-threatening effects of secondhand smoke. Nearly 70 percent of the U.S. workforce worked under a smoke-free policy in 1999, but the percentage of workers protected varies by state, ranging from a high of 83.9 percent in Utah to 48.7 percent in Nevada.

Nineteen states as well as the District of Columbia prohibit smoking in almost all public places and workplaces, including restaurants and bars. Other states prohibit smoking in some public places and workplaces. Michigan prohibits smoking in some public places, but has a long way to go to catch up with the other states.

It is pretty obvious to me that smoking is a very unhealthy habit. Personally, I can't think of anything worse for your health than smoking. Besides the things I already mentioned, it increases littering, stinks up people's clothing, makes the fingernails and teeth yellow, takes away the sense of taste and smell, pollutes the air, and makes many smokers cough and gag. I personally would never smoke, even for all the money in the world. I challenge all readers, especially if they smoke, to go to the Web site referenced below for a wealth of information about smoking.

There are seven medications approved by the FDA to aid in quitting smoking. Nicotine patches, nicotine gum and nicotine lozenges are available over the counter, and a nicotine nasal spray and inhaler are currently available by prescription. buproprion SR (Zyban) and varenicline tartrate (Chantix) are non-nicotine pills available by prescription.