
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, July 22, 1993                   TAG: 9307220138
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

SMOKING IN HOMES CALLED RISK

The government on Wednesday sounded the alarm on secondhand tobacco smoke, urging people to ban smoking in their homes and to press for anti-smoking laws in their communities.

The "EPA firmly believes that the scientific evidence is sufficient New heart artery cleaners no better than angioplasty. A3 to warrant actions to protect nonsmokers from involuntary exposure to secondhand smoke," said Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol Browner.

Browner announced EPA's new recommendations on secondhand smoke with particular emphasis on protecting children.

She spoke to the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health and environment. She displayed a new brochure in which the EPA urged parents not to allow smoking in their homes and said nonsmokers should be protected from secondhand smoke in public places and on the job.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the subcommittee, announced proposed legislation to banish smoking from all buildings open to the public except in designated, ventilated smoking rooms.

Meanwhile, the House Agriculture subcommittee on specialty crops and natural resources took testimony from four scientists who said EPA's work on secondhand smoke was fraught with manipulated data, statistical irregularities and an effort to make the science fit a preconceived anti-smoking goal.

The agency's finding that secondhand smoke caused 3,000 lung cancer deaths in nonsmokers each year "is a political figment of imagination supported by unwarranted assumptions, selective use of data, artful procedural manipulations and the contrived illusion of mathematical precision," said Dr. Gio Gori, president of the International Society of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology.

Gori and three other scientists who testified are paid consultants of The Tobacco Institute.

Several tobacco companies are challenging the findings in a federal court suit in Winston-Salem, N.C. The Justice Department filed a motion Wednesday to dismiss the suit.

EPA's report is bolstered by similar findings by the National Academy of Sciences and the Surgeon General.

by CNB