Passive smoking blamed for 10,000 UK deaths a year

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Britain’s doctors and nurses on Wednesday redoubled demands for smoking to be outlawed in enclosed public places as a new study showed that passive smoking may kill more than 10,000 people every year in the UK.

The findings, published in the British Medical Journal online, suggest that passive smoking at work is likely to kill more than 600 Britons a year, while passive smoking at home might account for another 10,700 deaths.

Mr James Johnson, Chairman of the British Medical Association, urged the government to bring forward legislation for a nationwide ban on smoking at work and other enclosed public places.

"With the latest figures in this BMJ paper revealing that second-hand smoke at work kills more than 600 non-smokers every year in the UK, I don’t know how (Health Secretary) John Reid can continue to serve the public half-measures on health. We need a total ban and we need it now.”

Sylvia Denton, President of the Royal College of Nursing, added: “Given the unarguable scientific evidence, it is now essential that policies are put into place to protect the public from exposure to other people’s smoke.”

The BMA and RCN backed an attempt to introduce smoke-free laws in Liverpool but stressed what was really needed was legislation to protect all citizens. So far England lags being Ireland and Scotland in terms of legislation.

The new study, by Konrad Jamrozik, of the University of Queensland in Australia, was designed to estimate deaths from passive smoking according to age group and site of exposure among UK adults.

The analysis assumes that the prevalence of passive smoking at home was 13 percent and that the prevalence in the workplace was 11 percent.

SOURCE: BMJ Online first, March 2, 2005.

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