Survey: The percentage of bar staff who would be prepared to ask customers to stop smoking almost doubled within four years of the introduction of a workplace ban in California, research has shown.
According to a study in the latest edition of the journal, Tobacco Control, 82 per cent of bar owners and staff surveyed said they would ask a patron who was smoking to stop or to continue outside the licensed premises.
When the 1,300 respondents were asked the same question four years earlier, just as the tobacco ban was first introduced in California in 1998, only 43 per cent said they would intervene with customers.
The findings will be welcomed by the Department of Health and the Office for Tobacco Control (OTC), which have been criticised by vintners' representatives over aspects of the legislation due to come into effect here next Monday, particularly the onus on staff working in bars.
It has been suggested that neither publicans nor environmental health officers would intervene directly with customers who continued to smoke in defiance of the workplace smoking ban.
In separate research by the New York Health Department, there was a significant drop in the level of exposure of bar and restaurant staff to a nicotine by-product just three months after the smoking ban went into effect in the US state.
The first two batches of saliva tested for cotinine - an easily measured by-product of nicotine in the body - showed that levels dropped by 85 per cent in a group of bar and restaurant workers compared with levels detected before the ban was introduced.
New York's anti-smoking law was implemented in July 2003 prohibiting smoking in bars, restaurants, night clubs, betting shops and company cars.
The amount of cotinine in the workers' saliva went from 6.6 nanograms per millilitre in June to 1.0 nanograms per millilitre in October, according to Dr Ursula Bauer of the New York Tobacco Use Prevention and Control Programme.
Meanwhile, the OTC will publish a report today on the possible economic effects of the smoke-free workplace legislation on the hospitality sector in the Republic.
The workplace smoking ban has as its key aim the protection of the health of workers and members of the public exposed to the harmful effects of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS).
The Minister for Health's strong stance on the ban is reinforced by the World Health Organisation's International Agency for Research on Cancer which has listed ETS as a Class A carcinogen.
If Mr Martin had not followed through with the ban, the State would have left itself open to Army deafness type claims for damages for workers whose health could become affected by ETS.
Additional reporting - AP