Up to 150 pub workers in the State will die this year due to ill health from passive smoking, a US health expert will say today.
Mr James Repace, a health physicist and expert on passive smoking, will be speaking at at a seminar on the hazards of environmental tobacco smoke in Dublin Castle.
The seminar, which will be opened by the Minister for Health and Children, Mr Martin, is organised by the Office of Tobacco Control.
Mr Repace, who has worked with the US Environmental Protection Agency, says: "Breathing second-hand smoke causes morbidity and mortality from cancer, heart disease and respiratory disease, as well as acute sensory irritation and it causes the premature death of hundreds of thousands of non-smokers worldwide.
"ETS [environmental tobacco smoke\] is now classified as a known human carcinogen and a cause of fatal heart disease in the USA," Mr Repace argues.
"It is an entirely avoidable public health risk, which has been shown to carry a staggering 82 per cent increase in the risk of stroke," he added.
Mr Repace said the State's Western Health Board conducted a study on the levels of smoke in bars in its area.
"The key findings of this study were that not only were bar ventilation systems (13 out of 14 bars) unable to maintain environmental tobacco smoke at low levels, but that it was so out of control that world record-breaking levels of carbon monoxide were found in two bars."
In addition, bar workers were found to be exposed for longer periods of passive smoking than imagined, with 40 per cent of respondents working in bars for 10 years or more and declaring they were exposed on average to 40 hours a week to passive smoking.
"Based on this study and my own studies of the effects of ETS on such workers in Hong Kong and Boston, I would estimate that approximately 150 bar workers a year in Ireland will die from ill health caused by ETS," Mr Repace says.