Passive smoking: fact and fiction

YOUR columnist Noel Whelan (Irish Examiner, June 23), in reviewing a proposed smoking ban in Britain, trots out all the usual anti-nicotine nonsense.

He says “it is now generally accepted there that second-hand smoking kills” - yet neither he nor any other advocate can name a single person in this country (or any other country, for that matter) whose death certificate states “Cause of death: Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS).”

Still, he goes on to state that “the NHS (National Health Service) argues that passive smoking causes anything up to 16,000 deaths in Britain.”