EPA Will Link Secondhand Smoke, Cancer

The Environmental Protection Agency will soon declare second-hand cigarette smoke a known carcinogen and offer the first official government estimates of the number of lung cancers caused by “passive smoking,” EPA sources said Tuesday.

According to sources familiar with the agency’s draft of an 18-month study, EPA scientists will conclude that smoking is responsible for more than 3,000 cases of lung cancer among nonsmokers each year.

The draft risk assessment and a proposed guide for reducing the hazard of secondary smoke in the workplace are expected to be published for public comment and submitted to an independent Science Advisory Board for professional review late this month or in early June.

The tobacco industry already has been shaken by the study and the prospect of environmental smoke being listed with radon and benzene among about two dozen Class A carcinogens. EPA officials working on the assessment have received a torrent of tobacco company comments.

Philip Morris Inc., one of the giants of the industry, is circulating a 1987 dissertation by a Yale University doctoral candidate purporting to show that nonsmokers exposed to the tobacco smoke of others suffer no statistically significant risk.

EPA scientists in charge of the assessment refused to discuss their findings on grounds that the draft is not yet complete.

But Bob Axelrad, the agency’s expert on indoor air pollution, said the draft and the guidelines will be supported by 24 studies of passive smoking published in professional journals. Eleven of the studies were published after a 1986 report on the subject by then-Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.

In a report compared to the landmark 1964 study on smoking and health, Koop then estimated that anywhere from “several hundred to several thousand lung cancer deaths per year” could occur among nonsmokers exposed to tobacco smoke.

The EPA has said the cost of indoor pollution could be in the tens of billions in medical costs and absenteeism. EPA scientist James L. Repace has estimated that the risks of indoor pollution from tobacco smoke may be twice as great as the danger from radon gas, and more than 100 times as great as from cancer-causing outdoor pollutants regulated by the EPA under the Clean Air Act.

Representatives of Philip Morris contend that the Yale dissertation by the late Luis Varela is “perhaps the largest study ever done” on the subject of smoking in the workplace, and complain that it has so far been ignored by the EPA in its assessment.

The study covers some 450 cases of lung cancer among nonsmokers. Philip Morris said it covers about 40% of all the cases examined in the published studies cited in the surgeon general’s 1986 report.

Thomas Borelli, a biochemist who works for the tobacco company, suggested Tuesday that the dissertation has been overlooked, along with others which fail to find a link between cancer and secondary smoke, “because there is a tendency for journals not to publish” negative findings. Axelrad said, however, that the study had been known to EPA officials before it was sent to the agency by the tobacco company last March, and that EPA had sought unsuccessfully to get further breakdowns of its supporting data from Yale.

Representatives of the Tobacco Institute, the industry lobby, said they are awaiting publication of the EPA’s draft and proposed guide before responding fully. But EPA sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said tobacco companies have been invited into the process as an affected industry and have responded with massive data challenging the 24 published studies.

A public relations firm engaged by Philip Morris to circulate the Varela study said the EPA “is expected to call for a ban on smoking in the workplace,” but agency spokesman David Cohen said the suggestion is “totally off the mark.”

At the moment, EPA has no authority to ban smoking, and Cohen and Axelrad said the risk assessment is not a part of a regulatory process.

That does not mean the EPA will not ban smoking in its own headquarters. A memorandum has been circulated to its staff suggesting that smoking in EPA offices may be forbidden in the future.

While the impending EPA recommendations caused new jitters in the tobacco industry, word of it was warmly received in the anti-smoking community.

“I think this is a major milestone in the protection of nonsmokers,” said Mark Pertschuk, executive director of Americans for Non-Smokers Rights, a Berkeley-based group.

“It tells us just how bad tobacco smoke is compared to other dangerous substances,” he added. “I believe this is going to radically alter the extent to which we as a society will accept exposure to this toxic source.”