Heart Assn. Calls for Public Ban on Secondhand Smoke : Health: Researchers say it should be treated as an environmental toxin and cite links to heart, lung diseases. Tobacco Institute disputes the claim.

WASHINGTON — The American Heart Assn. on Wednesday urged that secondhand smoke be treated as an environmental toxin that should be banned from offices and public places.

The group also dismissed claims by the Tobacco Institute that there is no clear evidence linking environmental tobacco smoke with lung and heart problems.

“In terms of carcinogenicity, there is nothing even close,” said Dr. Homayoun Kazemi, a physician who helped prepare an association paper on the topic. “The second-closest (environmental) cause of lung cancer would be asbestos.”

The paper contained no new scientific data, but summarized what its authors said was an overwhelming amount of evidence that exposure to the smoke of others increases a person’s chances of getting lung cancer, heart disease or emphysema.

The group said it is contacting Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan and William K. Reilly, director of the Environmental Protection Agency, to urge them to toughen federal smoking standards and increase federal aid for education about the risks of smoking.

Dr. Aubrey E. Taylor, another physician who helped draft the paper, said that since a landmark 1964 surgeon general’s report highlighting the dangers of smoking, there have been thousands of studies showing that secondary smoke increases the risks of heart and lung disease.

“I don’t think in 1992 we have to debate whether environmental tobacco smoke causes disease,” Kazemi added. “The evidence is there.”

That statement was sharply challenged by the Tobacco Institute, which insisted that “less than 100” studies have been done on the effects of secondary smoke.

“The weight of the scientific evidence continues to show that there is no link,” said Tom Lauria, a Tobacco Institute spokesman. “There just isn’t anything to support that.”

He said that seven of 12 studies on cardiovascular disease show no connection between those problems and secondary smoke, while 29 of 36 studies on lung cancer also fail to establish a link.

The paper concludes that about 50 million nonsmoking adults over the age of 35 are exposed to secondary smoke and estimates that about 50% of all American children live in families with one or more smokers.

According to studies cited in the paper, people who come into contact with secondary smoke are 1.3 times as likely to come down with heart disease, lung cancer or other respiratory illnesses than are nonsmokers who live and work in primarily smoke-free environments.

Secondary smoke could be a contributing factor to the deaths of 40,000 nonsmoking Americans every year from heart disease, said Dr. Douglas C. Johnson, one of the paper’s authors.