Medicine: Tobacco Wars

Is passive smoking harmful?

The campaign to ban cigarette smoking in public places received a big boost last January when Epidemiologist Takeshi Hirayama of Japan's National Cancer Center published the results of a 14-year study of 265,000 Japanese. He found that nonsmoking wives of heavy smokers had a higher risk of developing lung cancer than nonsmoking women married to men who did not smoke.

But now that conclusion is being challenged by an analysis of lung cancer deaths published last month in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Epidemiologist Lawrence Garfinkel of...

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