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Contra Costa holds off on apartment smoking ban 

MARTINEZ -- Medical marijuana has put a temporary lid on Contra Costa County's plans to ban smoking inside new apartments and condos, a major expansion of its already strict smoking laws.

The board on Tuesday postponed for two weeks a vote on the more restrictive secondhand smoking ordinance pending a decision about whether it should exempt the smoking of medically prescribed marijuana.

"Smoke is smoke," said board Chairman John Gioia, of Richmond. "But we need to know where this issue stands with respect to state law."

If adopted, smoking would be banned inside all apartment or condominium complexes of four units or more built after Jan. 1.

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• BHA pushes for smoke-free housing  

Meena Carr figured out years ago why her young grandson, Malik, was chronically coughing and wheezing: Her home made him sick. Carr, 69, didn't smoke cigarettes, but some of her neighbors in the Washington-Beech housing development did, often in the hallway. The smell permeated Carr's apartment.

Last month, Washington-Beech in Roslindale became the city's first smoke-free public housing development. Today, Carr plans to join other community leaders, public officials, and housing advocates to discuss the Boston Housing Authority's more ambitious long-term objective -- clearing the air by 2013 at all 64 public housing developments.

That positions Boston to become the first city in Massachusetts, and perhaps the largest housing authority nationwide, to impose such a ban. Under the proposal, still in its initial stages, about 27,000 residents in 12,000 units would be prohibited from smoking in common areas and their own apartments.

"This new initiative will go a long way to encourage more healthy living styles for our residents,'' said Mayor Thomas M. Menino . . .

Today's meeting at Suffolk University is being billed by officials as a "summit'' to launch the campaign. Details, including how a ban would be phased in and how violators would be punished, are still unclear. Housing officials say the process will include community debate and a public comment period. By January, they hope to submit a proposal to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Nationwide, about 170 public housing authorities -- roughly 5 percent -- have instituted some kind of no-smoking policy

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• One million signatures for no-smoking campaign 

More than 1.2 million signatures have been collected during a one-month No Smoking House campaign in Vietnam.

The figure was released by the Vietnam Women’s Union (VWU) Central Committee and the Office of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Vietnam at a meeting to sum up the campaign in Hanoi on July 22.

The No Smoking House campaign was launched on May 31 as part of activities in response to the World No Tobacco Day: ‘Tobacco and Gender’, focusing on the harmful effects of smoking on women and children.

Together with collecting signatures, the VWU Central Committee trained its staff and officers in 30 provinces and cities about the harmful effects of smoking, the smoking situation in Vietnam and the benefits of a non-smoking environment.

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Residents want clean air  

Fears about second-hand cigarette smoke have some residents in a county-run apartment building in Barrie looking for answers.

Officials from Simcoe County Housing, which operates the the eight-storey building at 1 Blake Street, met with about 30 of the residents earlier this week. A Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit public health nurse also attended.

As with other county-run apartment buildings, smoking is allowed inside apartments but not in hallways or any common areas.

Resident Albert Coulis, who has lived there since September, circulated a petition asking the county to do something about the second-hand smoke, and gathered signatures from 63 of the 91 tenants.

For starters, Coulis wants the county to pay for weatherstripping that would be installed around apartment doors to reduce the amount of drifting second-hand smoke.

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Campaign targets smoking around children 

CancerCare Manitoba launched its "The Butt Stops Here" window sticker campaign Thursday morning in conjunction with two studies showing kids are less likely to experiment with smoking if they're not exposed to smoke in the home or car, even if their parents smoke.

And all of this pointed to the ban and $200 fine as of July 15 for smoking in a vehicle in which children under 16 are riding.

Two new University of Manitoba and CancerCare Manitoba studies show kids are less likely to try smoking the less they're exposed to smoking, even if one or more other family members smoke.

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• W.Va. child most apt to live with smoker  

Seven-point-six percent of U.S. children live with someone who smokes tobacco at home but the number varies greatly among states, researchers found.

Gopal K. Singh and Michael D. Kogan of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Mohammad Siahpush of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, used data from the 2007 National Survey of Children's Health and state-level data on home smoking from the 2006–2007 Current Population Survey -- Tobacco Use Supplement.

The rates of children living with a smoker ranged from 1.1 percent for Utah and 1.9 percent for California to a high of 17.9 percent for West Virginia and 17.6 percent in Kentucky.

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Should smoking be banned in apartments? 

Will apartment complexes be the next smoke-free slice of life? Well, the city of Sebastopol in northern California is now considering a ban on smoking in apartments. Plus, a recent essay in The New England Journal of Medicine advocates that smoking should be banned in all multi-family housing and called on the federal government to prohibit tobacco smoke in Public Housing Authorities.

While governments have banned smoking in public places, private homes have been considered off-limits for such regulation. The journal argues that policy should end. . . .

In Orange County, about 36 Orange County landlords have registered their properties as tobacco-free with the Granada Hills-based Smokefree Apartment House Registry. The registry says there are at least 324 known units that are off-limits to smokers.

A Santa Ana youth brought up the issue in a recent "Straight Talk for Teens."

What do you think?

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Troy senior citizen apartment fire leaves one injured  

The fire in an apartment in a senior citizen housing complex in downtown Troy Monday evening is believed to have been caused by a male resident who was smoking while on home oxygen.

That resident was taken to Upper Valley Medical Center near Troy and was later transferred by Careflight to Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton.

He reportedly suffered facial burns and smoke inhalation.

The fire damage was contained to one room on the second floor of the Morris House

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• Smoke-Free Air Laws and Secondhand Smoke Exposure Among Nonsmoking Youth  

OBJECTIVES We investigated the association between smoke-free law coverage and cotinine among nonsmoking youth (3-19 years) with and without home secondhand smoke (SHS) exposure.

METHODS We used data from the 1999-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a cross-sectional survey designed to monitor the health and nutritional status of the US population. . . .

CONCLUSIONS These results suggest that smoke-free laws are an effective strategy for reducing cotinine in youth without home SHS exposure; however, among youth with home SHS exposure, no benefit was detected.

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Tobacco Smoke Exposure and Chronic Conditions of Childhood 

Two remarkable articles by Kwok et al1 and Brion et al2 in this month's Pediatrics tighten the evidence around tobacco smoke exposure and chronic conditions of childhood. Their work adds to previous research findings that demonstrated associations between tobacco smoke exposure and various childhood morbidities and mortality (Table 1).3 Indeed, 3 important categories of chronic conditions of childhood (asthma, obesity, and mental health disorders) have small-to-moderate independent associations with tobacco smoke exposure either during pregnancy or in the postnatal period. Dental caries are one of the most common chronic conditions of childhood, and a moderate independent association with tobacco smoke exposure has been described.4

View this table:

TABLE 1 Specific Health Effects of Prenatal and Postnatal Exposure to Tobacco Smoke

Following a large Hong Kong birth cohort, Kwok et al1 found an association between tobacco smoke exposure of pregnant mothers and subsequent child overweight. The study is methodologically important, because it examined this effect among mothers who themselves did not smoke but were exposed by the father. That paternal smoking also . . .

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• Disparities in Children's Exposure to Environmental Tobacco Smoke in the United States, 2007  

OBJECTIVES This study examined racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and geographic disparities in children's exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) or secondhand smoke in the home. . . .

CONCLUSIONS Considerable disparities exist in children's exposure to ETS, with geographic pattern strongly related to home smoking ban. Greater exposure to ETS among children in several states and disadvantaged socioeconomic groups is likely to exacerbate existing health disparities.

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• Sebastopol to consider smoking ban in apartments  

The city of Sebastopol will consider revisions to its smoking ordinance Tuesday that would make it one of the toughest in the Bay Area, extending a smoke-free umbrella to apartment dwellers.

"We already don't permit smoking in public parks and playgrounds and what have you," said City Manager Jack Griffin. "This ordinance is not all that much different, but it adds a whole new dimension of multi-family dwellings."

The revised ordinance would include marijuana in its ban, regardless of whether it is medically prescribed or if recreational marijuana use is approved by California voters in November.

"The issue is second-hand smoke, the view that particularly in many cases the ventilation systems are not stand-alone per unit, the issue of the ability of smoke to travel from unit to unit," Griffin said.

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• Public housing to go smoke-free 

Oscar Babcock Jr. has been smoking for 60 years and he's not about to quit now. But the former truck driver doesn't have a problem with a no-smoking rule in the works for his public housing complex.

"That's a good rule," Babcock, 75, said Thursday, while puffing away at a shaded lawn table in his front yard. "There is a lot of people that don't smoke around here."

For many renters in the private sector, no-smoking rules have long been the reality. Now public housing is following suit -- and locally, officials say they're getting a favorable response from tenants.

Babcock lives in 172-unit McKenzie Village, the largest public housing complex of the Housing and Community Services Agency of Lane County.

The agency plans to implement a no-smoking policy by Jan. 1 in all of its 1,400 low-income housing units.

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Clearing the air  

Dr. Jonathan Winickoff, a pediatrician at MassGeneral Hospital for Children, recently called for a ban on smoking in public housing in a New England Journal of Medicine commentary.

Q. Why focus on smoking in public housing?

A. There are certain groups who are particularly susceptible to tobacco smoke: the elderly, disabled persons, people who have compromised cardiac or pulmonary function, and children. Those groups have very high occupancy in public housing. There's an intersection between some of the most vulnerable populations and who resides in public housing.

Q. Why are children especially vulnerable?

A. Young children spend much of their time indoors and they have a higher metabolism rate. They ingest more dust than adults, so when they are in a contaminated environment, children often have a higher load of toxic contamination. In studies looking at [tobacco] carcinogens in children, those levels are higher than for [adult] nonsmokers.

Q. You coined the term "third-hand smoke.'' What is it?

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Boyfriend smokes in girl's bedroom – help!