Tobacco Scam: Smokefree Restaurants: Secondhand Smoke

Discussions of secondhand smoke often focus on the health risk to patrons, but what about restaurant and bar employees?

1. Restaurant and bar workers have much longer exposure than patrons.

2. Restaurant, bar, and casino workers are exposed to the highest levels of secondhand smoke of any occupational or demographic group.

3. Hospitality workers have less protection from secondhand smoke than any other group of workers.

Secondhand smoke levels up to 600% higher...

Levels of secondhand smoke in restaurants are about 160-200% higher than in smoking offices � and 150% higher than in a home with at least one smoker.

Secondhand smoke levels in bars are 390-610% higher than in offices that permit smoking � and 450% higher than in homes with a smoker.

But much less protection...

Hospitality employees are much less likely (21%) than other workers (46%) to work in smokefree workplaces, based on the latest figures.

Cotinine (which your body manufactures from the nicotine in secondhand smoke) is the most common biologic marker of secondhand smoke exposure. Casino workers in a well-ventilated Atlantic City casino were found, at the end of their shifts, to have an average cotinine level attributable to secondhand smoke exposure 300-600% higher than other workers exposed to secondhand smoke on the job.

A study in Hong Kong, where only 15% of adults smoke (much lower than in the U.S.), yielded similar results.

Yet just as it invests millions of dollars trying to confuse the pubic about the dangers of secondhand smoke, Big Tobacco finances "experts" who claim that exposure of workers to secondhand smoke is low or nonexistent.