“In 2017, 15.7% of people aged 18 to 64 with a professional activity said they had been exposed to second-hand tobacco smoke in the last 30 days inside the premises at their place of work”, report it barometer French public health. Manual workers seem to be the workers most exposed to passive smoking in their workplace (27.4%), while executives and higher intellectual professions are the least exposed (6.4%).
Conversely, smoking at home has fallen sharply from 27.5% in 2014 to 17.6% in 2018, suggesting that a large number of people are now going out to smoke. At the house of “smokers living in a household with a child: the frequency of smoking at home was halved between 2014 and 2018, from 31.6% to 14.4% in the presence of a child under 4 years old”. However, if it has fallen, thehe share of people declaring to smoke inside their home “remains high among heavy smokers and is not negligible for households with children”, stipulates Public Health France.
A digital campaign in favor of Tabac info service
“These new data underscore the need to continue our tobacco denormalization efforts to limit passive smoking, both at home and in the workplace,” commented Viet Nguyen Thanh, head of the addictions unit at Public Health France. To encourage smokers to quit, Public Health France is launching a digital information campaign on the Tobacco Info Service cessation aid system and its telephone service, 39 89.
The national health agency wishes to highlight the freeness of this service, its flexibility (since it is possible to set up a telephone appointment with a tobacco specialist) and its effectiveness: “87% of service users believe that telephone support by Tabac info service helped them in their efforts to quit smoking”.
Lung cancer from passive smoking
In May 2019, a group of experts in respiratory medicine estimated that lung cancer in people who have never smoked is underestimated and “represents a diagnostic challenge, especially for general practitioners who are trying to find a balance between over-investigation, early diagnosis and high-quality care”.
In 2014, a study carried out in the pneumology departments of 104 French hospitals (CHU excluded) and covering 7,051 files had shown that more than one patient in ten (762) being treated for lung cancer did not smoke
. Among them, 11% had never smoked in their life but 158 (20%) had been subjected to passive smoking
.
.
