BRAZIL: Smoking or Non-Smoking?

By Clarinha Glock Reprint | | Print |

Clarinha Glock

SAO PAULO, Brazil, Nov 13 1995 (IPS) - When Sao Paulo, Brazil’s most cosmopolitan city, decided to prohibit smoking in restaurants in line with the wishes of Mayor Paulo Maluf, it sparked an immediate furore.

Though such measures are now commonplace in the United States, and arouse little controversy, not so in Brazil where smokers are generally used to having their own way.

But the case for non-smokers has been reinforced by research by professors Ronaldo Laranjeira of the Paulist Medical School and Martin Raw of the University of London. Their studies show that the effect of cigarette smoke on non-smokers sharing closed spaces is more harmful than had been thought.

The finding strengthens arguments favouring restrictions on smoking in public places.

The research studied a group of 100 non-smoking waiters from eight Sao Paulo restaurants and a similar-sized control group of non-smoking medical students.

“The waiters showed an exposure to nicotine at the workplace that was eight times that of the students,” Laranjeira said.

The researchers said this proved that dividing an area into smoking and non-smoking zones – as business proprietors suggest – was not necessarily a solution, because exposure rates (in the enclosed area) were practically the same.

Those included in the study were aged between 18 and 54 years and worked an average nine hours a day. Forty-two of the participating waiters were former smokers and 58 had never smoked.

At the beginning and end of each workday, the researchers measured the waiters’ blood pressure along with the contents of their exhaled air and saliva. The waiters worked in large restaurants, with 50 to 89 tables.

The researchers were not surprised to find evidence of exposure to nicotine in subjects who had not smoked a cigarette. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 50,000 passive smokers die every year in that country because of tobacco-related diseases.

Cigarettes are known to contain almost 4,000 chemical substances, some 50 of which are carcinogenic. Research has shown that cigarette smoke accounts for 80 to 90 percent of the air pollution in enclosed areas.

“Studies conducted over the past 10 years tell us we can no longer be complacent about the indirect effects of tobacco,” Laranjeira said.

“The objective is not to prohibit smokers from continuing with their destructive habit but to keep them from damaging the health of others,” added Raw, a consultant to the World Health Organization.

Raw believes that a cost-benefit calculation justifies the campaign against tobacco. Studies he conducted in Great Britain showed that reducing cigarette consumption created sales and production jobs because the former smokers increased their spending on entertainment and education.

The huge cigarette advertising presence in Brazil should be challenged, said Raw, who noted that Great Britain banned television cigarette advertising in 1965.

The Brazilian Ministry of Health requires only a warning, given at the end of the commercial, that smoking can be harmful to health.

Raw believes that the problem is a cultural one, arguing that “many countries have compelled the transnational cigarette producers to limit their advertising, so they take their campaigns to more vulnerable countries.”

A change in approach occurs only when there is pressure for it, and the heavy promotion of cigarette smoking in Brazil will continue as long as no concrete action is taken against the companies and their advertising, Raw declared.

His University of London studies suggest that tobacco does not even provide the pleasure smokers claim for it.

“Carbon monoxide worsens the power of concentration and stress relief has not been proven,” Raw said, adding that “smokers generally suffer more stress than non-smokers.”

The research suggested that those craving nicotine consume it directly and avoid the 4,000 additional substances in cigarettes that have such a damaging effect on health.