Standards committee report ready soon

The Malta Standards Authority's technical committee has reached the final stages of its work to establish the specifications of air quality in places of entertainment, in view of smoking regulations that will come into effect in April next year.

The authority's legal adviser, Lorna Cachia, said the committee would soon submit its final report to the MSA which would then present it to the Ministry of Health.

The Health Minister would then decide on the way forward.

The committee is made up of a number of representatives of the interested parties in the issue. It is establishing the technical specifications for equipment to meet health ministry requirements laid down in the regulations.

The aim is for bars and restaurants to have air that is clean enough not to be harmful.

The World Medical Association believes that air-cleaning systems do not remove all the dangerous substances that arise from smoking. Association president James Appleyard said last month that installing such equipment was just not good enough.

The initial publication of the regulations had been met with scorn by bar and restaurant owners, who argued they did not have enough time to comply with the requirement to ban smoking except in specially sealed-off areas.

Although a smoking ban in all public places was originally meant to have come into force on April 5, Health Minister Louis Deguara agreed to postpone the ban applying to bars and restaurants by between six months and a year. Those establishments measuring under 60 square metres have to install air-purifying equipment.

The State of the Environment Report 2002, published by the Planning Authority, had reported on a study of the air quality of two bars in the same street in St Julians.

The first was equipped with extractor fans while the second had no similar ventilation and a larger clientele. The average concentration of benzene during a typical Saturday night to Sunday morning session at the extractor fans bar was shown to be 18.5 milligrams per cubic metre. The second bar, however, had levels of 726 milligrams per cubic metre.

The report had said that the "alarming levels of benzene" in environments similar to those in the second bar "must present significant health risks for both customers and especially staff", and should raise concerns on public health and safety connected with this aspect of the leisure industry.

"Serious consideration should be given to enforcing controls on smoking and, or, to provide adequate ventilation to these places of entertainment in order to protect patrons from an insidious and considerable danger," the report had said.

An article that appeared last week in the British Medical Journal states that the increase in cigarette tax and the ban on smoking in bars and restaurants in New York are being credited with contributing to an 11 per cent decline in the number of adult smokers.

Commenting about this, the head of the Health Promotion Department, Mario Spiteri, said a steep decline in smoking was seen wherever a smoking ban was put in place.

Dr Spiteri said the profile of a quitter was that once they could not smoke in the places that they frequented, they decided to give up.

And the trend in Malta showed that a number of people actually wanted to stop smoking, Dr Spiteri added. More than 1,000 people took part in this year's Quit And Win campaign, which will come to an end today - World No Tobacco Day.

Dr Spiteri noted that there had been a downward trend in the smoking habits of men over the age of 40 who start to fear the negative effects of tobacco, especially on their sex life.

However, more women between 16 and 24 years were smoking. He said that if this trend continued, in about a decade, the cases of lung cancer among women would surpass those for breast cancer.

"Smoking kills 25 years after the habit is taken up," he said.