Smoking report in US heralds new curbs

THE United States government has finally deemed officially that second-hand cigarette smoke can cause cancer - a verdict that may herald yet tougher curbs on smoking here and will almost certainly ensure gainful new employment for the country's mighty army of liability lawyers.

In a report two years in the making and to be published today, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concludes that 'passive' smoke inhaled from other people's cigarettes is both a human lung carcinogen and a major cause of serious illness to young children.

According to EPA scientists, such exposure causes between 150,000 and 300,000 cases of bronchitis and pneumonia among infants up to 18 months, and significantly worsens a child's risk of asthma attacks. They also believe that up to 3,000 lung cancer deaths every year are directly due to second-hand smoke.

The US, where cigarette consumption has been steadily declining for several years, already possesses some of the most stringent anti-smoking rules anywhere. The bulk of offices are 'smoke-free', while smoking is banned on even the longest internal flights. Several large airports have recently banned smoking anywhere on their premises. These latest findings are likely to hasten even more severe curbs.

William Reilly, outgoing head of the EPA, predicts 'profound reverberations in the country'. Although his agency has no powers to regulate indoor air pollution, and any follow-up will be the task of the new Clinton administration, the report is widely expected to lead local governments and the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration to ponder an outright ban on smoking in the workplace and places frequented by children.

Predictably, the conclusions have been savagely assailed by the tobacco companies. A spokesman for Philip Morris declared there was 'no statistically significant increased risk' from exposure to 'enviromental tobacco smoke'. The EPA, he said, was 'adjusting science' to social trends, and 'the mind-set we want to discourage people from smoking'.

But they have been enthusiastically greeted by powerful US public health lobbies, in the words of one yesterday 'as confirmation at last of what the general public has known for a long time'. At a state level, activists are likely to press for an immediate prohibition of smoking at all schools, day centres and children's playgrounds.

Arguably, however, the legal consequences may be the most far reaching. Beleaguered tobacco companies are still fighting a rearguard action in the benchmark Cipollone case, in which the family of a New Jersey woman who died of lung cancer after being a heavy smoker for 40 years was awarded dollars 400,000 ( pounds 260,000) of damages against the makers of her preferred brand. But the EPA's conclusions on 'passive smoking' cast the net of potential liability far wider.

As Mr Reilly declared in an interview with the Wall Street Journal: 'If you were running a bar or an airline or a bodyshop or whatever, and you allowed customers to smoke, you'd be opening yourself up 10 or 15 years later to lawsuits. People would be able to say, 'you knew you were exposing us to cancer, there wasn't any doubt about the issue. The government has spoken on the question.' '

The Philip Morris spokesman said any such lawsuits would fail, because specific proof would be impossible. But in America the mere threat of litigation can produce changes in lifestyle. Many businesses may play it safe and ban smoking anyway.