The Impact of Secondhand Smoke on Pub Workers: A 2002 Consultation for the Irish Office of Tobacco Control

In June of 2024, I was asked by the Environmental Health Officer of Galway, Ireland, to recount my endeavors in support of the 2002 push to ban smoking in Irish workplaces, led by The Office of Tobacco Control (OTC) for The Republic of Ireland. At that time, OTC's smoke-free campaign was being vigorously opposed by publicans as well as the Irish tobacco industry. Their opposition had downplayed any effects of secondhand smoke on pub workers' health. As a researcher, I had published 46 peer-reviewed papers on the hazard, exposure, dose, risk, and control of secondhand smoke since 1980. In 1998, I had become a secondhand smoke consultant, assisting entities in the U.S. and abroad who were attempting to enact workplace smoking bans. In 2002, OTC's then Director, Tom Power, had contacted me to request my technical assistance to the Irish government in their campaign to enact a workplace smoking ban in Irish pubs. Accordingly, I asked for any local data that might aid me in my effort. He provided me with measurements of carbon monoxide from secondhand smoke in 14 Galway Pubs, performed by the Irish researcher Maurice Mulcahy in support of his Master's Thesis. Using a pharmacokinetic model that enabled mapping secondhand smoke carbon monoxide to its equivalent nicotine metabolite body fluid cotinine, I estimated that based on the Galway pub data, secondhand smoke exposures of nonsmoking Irish pub workers were at the upper extreme for nonsmokers when compared to a study of cotinine in London pub staff relative to the general population. Further, using a dose-response relationship, I was able to estimate that the working-lifetime risk of mortality from workplace secondhand smoke exposure would produce an estimated 150 deaths per year among the ∼28,000 full-time Irish pub workers. I presented this information to the Health Minister and Members of Parliament at the Dail, and in numerous multi-media interviews. These estimates rebutted bogus tobacco industry assertions that ventilation could control secondhand smoke, fired up the effort championed by Health Minister Micheál Martin to ban smoking in pubs, and helped to protect pub workers from being forced to trade their health for a pay cheque.