Smoking and driving shouldn’t mix
Driving long distances with a smoker this Labor Day weekend? You might be jeopardizing your health.
A new study finds that someone smoking just two cigarettes in a motor vehicle can expose fellow travelers to secondhand smoke well above U.S. government safety standards.
Wayne Ott and Neil Klepeis, both of Stanford University, in California, calculated over 100 air change measurements involving smoking by keeping track of a number of independent variables like car speed, fan position, air conditioning setting and whether windows were open or closed.
The researchers calculated that in a car with the windows up and the air conditioning on maximum, after just two cigarettes, the exposure of smoke to a passenger would exceed the U.S. government levels by 20 percent. Even with a car’s windows open, smoke particle concentrations were higher than levels measured in California bars before a state smoking ban enacted in the 1990s.
“In other words, being in the car with a smoker under these conditions gives such a huge amount of particulates that you’ll exceed what would be considered a safe level of exposure,” Mr. Klepeis said.
Their study is published in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology.