ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, December 16, 1995 TAG: 9512190015
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: INDIANAPOLIS
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
For 18 years, Mildred Wiley was a nurse in the psychiatric ward at a Veterans Administration hospital, caring for patients who smoked so much that she often worked in a blue haze.
Last week, the U.S. Labor Department ordered the VA to pay her widower $21,500 a year until his death - half of her salary - in the first workers' compensation case in the nation linking secondhand smoke to a cancer death.
In the past, the government has awarded claims for respiratory illness and other ailments linked to secondhand smoke, said John Banzhaf, executive director of Action on Smoking and Health, a Washington-based anti-smoking group.
In Wiley's case, the Labor Department ruled Dec. 8 that secondhand smoke was partly to blame for her death from lung cancer in 1991. Wiley didn't smoke. Nor does her husband.
``This is great news, even though this one at the moment is confined to workers' compensation,'' Banzhaf said. ``It will alert people to the fact that they can make a claim which they didn't think they could make before. Employers are going to say, `If we don't ban smoking, we could face future claims.'''
LENGTH: Short : 33 linesby CNB