Smoking outside may be bad for your health

AFTER a year of clean air in our workplaces, we could have reasonably expected the Office of Tobacco Control to report a fall-off in hospital admissions and huge drops in cancer and coronary heart failure rates.

We were, after all, led to believe that environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) was (maybe) the biggest killer.

But instead they state that carbon monoxide (CO) levels have fallen by 45% in pubs. Statistics like these are designed to impress but on closer examination, they are meaningless. Carbon monoxide is present in low levels in the air everywhere. Open flames are the most common source of carbon monoxide and motor vehicles are the most common cause of carbon monoxide poisoning.