Ventilation and Filters

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Ears, Nose, and Lungs: How to Help Your Family Clear the Air

Strategies

• Let every caregiver (including teenage babysitters) know that you don't allow your children to be in smoke-filled environments. That means no smoking in your home but also no visits to smoky coffee shops.
• Ask about the policy on smoking anywhere that your child spends time: his school, the community centre, the local arena. Be clear that your child requires a smokefree place to play or take lessons.

The Problem with Ventilation

VENTILATION systems in homes and workplaces were never designed to remove smoke. Their main purposes are to limit the accumulation of carbon dioxide, which we exhale, and to keep odors down. At an average ventilation rate of one air exchange per hour, it takes three hours to remove 95 per cent of the smoke from a single cigarette -- and the remaining five per cent can still be harmful.

Electronic air cleaners, air purification systems and "smokeless" ashtrays can double or triple the rate of clearing the air of smoke. But the air-exchange rate needs to increase a thousandfold in order to be effective. Such a system would have to be so powerful it would create gale-force winds, says Mary Jane Ashley, principal investigator of the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit.

Confining smokers to one room in a house or one section of a workplace doesn't work either, since the laws of physics dictate that the smoke will disperse throughout the area. As for nonsmoking sections in restaurants, Garfield Mahood, executive director of the Non-Smokers' Rights Association, compares that to having urinating and nonurinating sections in a swimming pool.

Opening a window can help -- but depending which way the wind is blowing, it can also direct the smoke straight to a nonsmoker.

There is only one method to keep an indoor space smokefree: send smokers outdoors.

Strategies

• Ask your kids how they feel about smoking.
  
• If you're a smoker, try to explain what the addiction is like. Be honest about your own worries and feelings of guilt.
  
• Accept the fact that kids have a right to a smokefree home and be open to discussing how, as a family, you will achieve that.
  

Strategies

• If you are pregnant and you smoke, quit. Every cigarette not smoked helps you and your fetus.
  
• Ask all the smokers you know not to smoke around you.
  
• Let people know that your home will continue to be a smokefree environment after your baby arrives.

Strategies

• Encourage your teens to support smokefree businesses (and do so yourself).
  
• If your teen is spending time in places where smoking is allowed -- a mall food court or video arcade -- let the owners know your concerns and ask them to establish a smokefree policy.
  
• If your teen is smoking, take her addiction seriously. Offer to help them quit.
  

Know the Rules and Regulations for Butting Out

SMOKING is subject to a patchwork of federal, provincial and municipal legislation.

By federal law, it's illegal to sell or supply tobacco products to anyone under 18. Some provinces have raised the age to 19.

Smoking is banned in most federally regulated workplaces, such as banks and government offices. It's also banned in provincial government workplaces in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland (Newfoundland bans smoking in all workplaces and has requirements for ventilation for those places with smoking sections, such as restaurants) and in territorial government offices in the Northwest Territories.

About 97 per cent of schools have smoking policies, but only 66 per cent ban smoking completely, both indoors and outdoors, at all times. Sanctions against students are usually stronger than those against staff.

Almost all licensed day-care centres have policies, most of them unwritten, but only 62 per cent of day-care agencies regulate smoking in home day cares.

One-quarter of hospitals permit smoking in areas that do not have separate ventilation. In one out of every five health-care institutions that restrict smoking, cigarettes are nevertheless for sale.

More than one-third of municipalities with populations over 10,000 have smoking control bylaws for public places. In January, Toronto banned smoking at food courts in malls. Toronto, Vancouver and smaller municipalities, including Guelph, Ont., are now considering making restaurants 100 per cent smokefree. While the food service industry worries about losing business, a study from the United States, where 146 municipalities have banned smoking in all restaurants, found no effect on sales. In fact, a 1995 survey of the Greater Vancouver Area and Victoria found that a restaurant smoking ban could increase business.

What's in Secondhand Smoke? The List Is Deadly

NONSMOKERS have good reason to ask people not to smoke around them. Environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) contains more than 4,000 chemicals, including 50 known carcinogens.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency has classified ETS as a Group A carcinogen, one of a small group of compounds known definitely to cause cancer in humans.

ETS contains poisons such as arsenic, benzene, lead and formaldehyde.

Nitrogen dioxide, a gas that can damage lungs, is so toxic that air levels of five parts per million are considered dangerous; ETS contains 250 parts per million. Long-term exposure to hydrogen cyanide, another poisonous gas, is hazardous at 10 parts per million; the concentration in smoke is 1,600 parts per million.

Some compounds that are banned in Canadian workplaces, such as the carcinogen 4-aminobiphenyl, are present in ETS.

Pipe smoke is as bad as cigarette smoke, and cigar smoke is worse. One cigar, five inches long and as thick as your thumb, produces 30 times as much carbon monoxide as a cigarette, putting a room in the hazardous range within 30 minutes.

Strategies

• If you live with a smoker, be supportive of efforts to quit but be firm about your own right to live in a smokefree home.
  
• Ask a smoker to smoke outside but agree to sit outside or go for a walk with her to show you're not rejecting her, just the smoke.
  
• Enlist a doctor's help. Encouragement from a doctor trained in helping smokers quit doubles the success rate.