Determination of nicotine as an indicator of environmental tobacco smoke in restaurants

✍ Scribed by Leea Kuusimäki; Pirkko Pfäffli; May Frøshaug; Georg Becher; Erik Dybing; Kimmo Peltonen

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 69 KB
• Volume: 36
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0271-3586
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1097-0274(199909)36:1+<152::aid-ajim54>3.0.co;2-e

✦ Synopsis

BACKGROUND

There is an increasing concern regarding the health hazard that exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) may pose to the general public. In order to protect nonsmokers from passive smoking, many countries in the 1990s have established ordinances and policies to reduce or prohibit smoking in public premises. Many workplaces have either restricted smoking to special rooms or prohibited it entirely. In most of the cases, restaurants make an exception to these regulations and both employees and customers are often exposed to high levels of ETS. Ordinances introduced in 1993 in Norway required one-third of the total indoor seating space in a restaurant to be no-smoking areas. Since January 1, 1998, one-half of the seating capacity must be reserved as a no-smoking section; and there are speci®c requirements for the location of the section and the ventilation system. A maximum nicotine concentration of 10 mg/m 3 in the no-smoking area is used as an indicator for compliance with the regulations.

From the many indicators of ETS that have been used in the past, nicotine was chosen for this study as it is highly speci®c for tobacco smoke and relatively easy to measure at the concentration levels at which it occurs in indoor environments [