I'm curious. Do you have some information on how many employers are keen to devote resources towards installing heavy-duty ventilation systems, monitoring respirable particle levels in the rest of the building, paying the inevitable fines, and updating and remediating their facility vs. doing the minimum necessary and sending the smokers outside? Especially in the setting of the OP who bemoaned employers who wouldn't even bother setting up a shelter outside?
Linda
But Linda, this is the fallacy of the 'veritable indoor tornado' that would be required to nullify the effects of second hand smoke, as espoused by James Repace, the ardent anti-smoking campaigner, in his paper 'Controlling Tobacco Smoke Pollution', and the parallel myth that there is 'no safe level' of particulates from tobacco smoke.
Repace's calculations and methodology in that paper, published in the journal of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-conditioning Engineers (hardly The Lancet, right?
) were nothing short of ludicrous. On the basis that an average sized bar would require 18 air changes/hour and that 6,750 out of a million bar workers exposed to second hand smoke would die as a result (both unsubstantiated claims) he then multiplied the two figures and concluded that the hypothetical bar would need 33 air changes
per second to ensure that no-one would die. I wager that to any reasonable person this is patently absurd.
But, on the basis of these claims the British government decided that ventilation systems in pubs would be useless and therefore the only solution was a universal ban on smoking in public places.
Suggesting that a building containing a small room where people can smoke, with windows and a fan or vent, would also require equipment placed throughout to measure air particulates I consider to be an example of melodramatic overkill. I know as a doctor you will probably disagree and consider such steps to be reasonable to protect employee health, but life is about risk and there is a level at which we say that the steps required to minimise the risk are greater than what can be justified by the scale of the risk.
In terms of second hand smoke (SHS), in my opinion it is the years and years of unrelenting propaganda from the anti-smoking lobby has resulted in the threat of SHS being blown up out of all proportion in the minds of both health professionals and the public.
I am not a promoter of the tobacco companies, I don't work for Philip Morris, but I believe passionately in freedom of choice and tolerance for other people's behaviours and lifestyles. In the West we are becoming a society of fearful isolationists, paranoid about our health and nebulous threats from unseen bogey-men. We are losing our communities, as evidenced by the closure of pub houses across the UK. We are losing our trust in our neighbours. This might be the world that some people want, but it isn't the world that I want.
Sorry, I went off on something a tangent there. Apologies if I de-railed.
