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More than half of all nonsmokers in New York City have elevated levels of a nicotine byproduct in their blood indicating recent exposure to cigarette smoke, a city health department study has found. The figure is surprisingly high given the city’s stringent public smoking ban, among the toughest in the country.
Some 56.7 percent of nonsmokers living in the city were found to have elevated levels of the nicotine metabolite cotinine, compared with an average 44.9 percent of nonsmokers nationwide. Among the ethnic groups studied, nonsmokers of Asian descent were most often affected, with 68.7 percent of those examined showing elevated blood levels of cotinine.
The long-term health consequences of the finding are not known, but secondhand smoke is estimated to account for at least 35,000 deaths from heart disease and 3,000 deaths from lung cancer in nonsmokers nationwide each year.
Researchers with the health department said they were unsettled by the finding, which they called “puzzling.”
New York City has fewer smokers per capita than many other American cities. Only 23.3 percent of adults in the city smoked at the time of the study, compared with a national average of 29.7 percent around the same time.
The study was published this week in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research. The analysis is based on data gathered during a survey of 1,767 adults ages 20 and older in 2004, more than a year after passage of the Smoke Free Air Act of 2002, which banned smoking in virtually all city workplaces, including bars and restaurants.
“This is not what we expected,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, commissioner of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, who led the city’s initiatives to curb smoking and is one of the paper’s authors. “It is a shocking number.”
But while a higher percentage of New Yorkers appear to be exposed to secondhand smoke, nonsmokers in other parts of the country tend to have higher levels of cotinine if they are exposed at all, the study found.
That finding suggests that New Yorkers are breathing cigarette smoke at lower levels but more often, a consequence of living in an usually dense urban environment.
While Dr. Frieden suggested that New Yorkers are being exposed primarily through sidewalk contact with smokers, passing through crowds smoking outside doorways or waiting with smokers at bus stops, the tobacco expert Dr. Jonathan P. Winickoff suggested that apartment dwellers might also be exposed to smoke drifting from one unit to another within a building.
“Smoke doesn’t know to stop at a doorway,” said Dr. Winickoff, a professor at Harvard Medical School. “It fills the full capacity of every indoor location in which the cigarette is smoked.” |
