IT may excite the anti-smoking lobby but the news that a barmaid in Australia has been awarded damages for allegedly developing throat cancer from years of "passive smoking" is hardly the breakthrough it is claimed.
Australia itself placed the alleged dangers of passive smoking firmly in context when a report by the National Health and Medical Research Council, published in 1996, claimed that passive smoking caused 10 deaths from lung cancer a year in a country with a population of 18 million people.
Even that figure was exaggerated because the NHMRC was later shown to have omitted research that did not suit its recommendations that smoking should be prohibited in shops, offices, malls, hotels and other public areas.
Britain must reject the type of litigious society exemplified by the United States and now, sadly, Australia.
I am sure the majority of people - smokers and tolerant non-smokers - would agree with that.
SIMON CLARK, Director, FOREST (Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco), London.
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