Health Effects of Involuntary Smoking

ALTHOUGH each year since 1964 the Surgeon General has identified smoking as the single most important cause of preventable mortality, of late attention has been focused increasingly on the health effects of involuntary, or passive, smoking. When this topic was first raised in the 1972 Report of the Surgeon General,1 only a handful of studies addressed the issue. In 1979, the encyclopedic report on cancer2 devoted a chapter to passive smoking. The 1984 report on chronic obstructive lung disease3 devoted more attention to passive smoking, on the basis of studies suggesting that nonsmokers who were exposed to spouses who . . .