Below are excerpts from a number of reports other than that of the EPA on the subject of ETS and lung cancer in humans. This information should be given to legislators, agency officials, and others who may be thinking of adopting restrictions on smoking. Workers should not be involuntarily exposed to tobacco smoke. To prevent worker exposures to any hazardous substances, employers should first eliminate hazardous workplace emissions at their source. . . . Therefore, the best method for controlling worker exposure to ETS is to eliminate tobacco use from the workplace and to implement a smoking cessation program.
Involuntary smoking is a cause of disease, including lung cancer, in healthy nonsmokers.
The children of parents who smoke compared with children of nonsmoking parents have an increased frequency of respiratory infections, increased respiratory symptoms, and slightly smaller rates of increase in lung functions as the lung matures. The relationship between lung cancer among nonsmokers and ETS has been documented in both case-control and longitudinal studies. Most of these studies have measured the increased risk of lung cancer among nonsmoking women, usually wives exposed to their husband's tobacco smoke. The weight of evidence derived from epidemiological studies shows an association between ETS exposure of nonsmokers and lung cancer that, taken as a whole, is unlikely to be due to chance or systematic bias. . . . It is the official position of this Department that nonsmoker exposure to tobacco smoke, at those levels commonly found in indoor environments where smoking is permitted, increases the risk of lung cancer and possibly other chronic diseases.