Personal Injury Law

Smoke-Free Laws Cut Hospitalizations For Everyone

By Jane Akre

Implementing smoke-free laws in public places, appears to cut down on the number of hospitalizations for heart attacks.

That is the results of the latest study reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), looking at Pueblo, Colorado's smoke-free ordinance after it went into effect, July 2003.

Almost immediately there was less exposure to everyone from secondhand smoke and smoke-free rules in public may has transferred to smoke-free at home or quitting altogether, a CDC editorial suggests.

The Pueblo Heart Study found that 399 people went to the hospital for heart attacks before the smoke-free laws went into effect.  Three years after the smoke-free law, that number dropped to 237 - a 41 percent decline.

Not knowing whether participants smoked or not, the CDC in an editorial says this outcome is similar to a drop in heart attack hospitalization seen in eight other studies where smoke-free laws were enforced.

The Environmental Protection Agency has classified secondhand smoke (SHS) as a known human carcinogen.

Eliminating smoking indoors is the only way to fully protect nonsmokers from SHS, according to a 2006 Surgeon General's report. 

A 2006 Surgeon General report concluded that "exposure of adults to secondhand smoke has immediate adverse effects on the cardiovascular system and causes coronary heart disease and lung cancer," CNN reports.

Second-hand smoking may also increase the likelihood of children reporting nicotine addiction, according to a 2008 study out of Universite de Montreal.

The Pueblo Colorado study is published in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly report published this week.

Smokers wanting to say goodbye to their cigarettes, tend to have better luck in a social network with the support and influence of friends and family.

A report out of Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Diego finds that smoking cessation program geared to groups may have the most success. The paper, financed by the National Institute on Aging, is published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).  #

Full post as published by InjuryBoard on January 02, 2009 (boomark / email).