The Dangers of Second-Hand Smoke
Friday, February 27th, 2004Last year there was a long debate in the comments about smoking in public. While that conversation has been lost in the migration from Blogger to Movable Type, this article is a good example of the dangers that I was talking about :
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that an airline can be held liable for the death of a passenger from a severe asthma attack caused by exposure to secondhand smoke.The 6-2 ruling was a defeat for Olympic Airways, the Greece-based airline that challenged a $1.4 million award against it in the case of a 52-year-old doctor from California who died on a 1998 flight from Athens to New York.
The airline had argued that it cannot be held liable under the Warsaw Convention, an international treaty on airline liability, when a passenger’s pre-existing medical condition has been aggravated in the aircraft cabin.
The U.S. Justice Department disagreed. It said an airline’s unreasonable refusal to assist a passenger who becomes ill during an international flight, in violation of its own policies and industry standards, can lead to liability.
The case involved Dr. Abid Hanson. After boarding the flight in Athens, Hanson and his family discovered they were in nonsmoking seats near the smoking section, which was not separated by a partition.
A flight attendant repeatedly rejected requests from Hanson’s daughter to move him to a different seat. The attendant said the flight was full, even though there were 11 empty seats.
After Hanson died on the plane, his family sued and claimed his death stemmed from a severe asthma attack caused by inhaling secondhand smoke.
The problem here is that most people see cigarette smoke as something that’s mildly annoying, but not dangerous. As far as they’re concerned, those of us who complain about smoke in public are just whiners. Well, I hope this puts things in better prospective. Second hand smoke can kill people, so the idea that smoker’s civil rights are violated by public smoking bans is nothing compared to the rights of non-smokers to not die because of someone else’s addiction.





