Correspondents' Correspondence

...Lars M. Ramstorm, director of the Swedish National Smoking and Health Association, predicted in the latest issue of the who journal World Health that the decision "will support and accelerate future development toward reducing the social acceptability of smoking, and effectively contribute to strengthening measures to create smoke-free environments...

...And the National Anti-Smoking Association, at the behest of the government, has developed a program aimed at making Norway "smoke-free" by the year 2000...

...Existing antismoking laws in Norway are already among the strongest in Europe...

...Among its prescriptions are a substantially increased cigarette tax—revenues from which would go to help people stop smoking —and drastic limitations on the sale of tobacco products...

...The verdict has opened the way for litigation in many similar cases in Scandinavia...

...Four distinguished medical scientists testified that passive smoking is sufficient to induce biological effects leading to impaired lung function...

...As a who spokesman pointed out, "Even in countries with more limited legislation and programs, there has been a marked decline in smoking...

...Because of the enormous medical, commercial and social implications of the case, it was fought all the way from a regional court to the highest specialized judicial authority in the land...

...The most striking attack on smoking, however, has come from the Swedish courts...

...More ambitiously, the World Health Assembly during its 39th session here in May affirmed that tobacco use in every form is incompatible with the who's objective of creating conditions for the universal attainment of reasonable health standards by the turn of the century...

...How dramatically will such changes be manifested in the public health profile...

...The Restrictive Measures Act for the Marketing of Tobacco Products, passed in 1973, bans tobacco advertising from all mass media...

...The assembly called for an immediate, coordinated global public health strategy "to combat the smoking pandemic...

...In the U.S., the proportion of smokers declined from 42 per cent to 3 3 per cent between 1965 and 1980...

...The family of a lung cancer victim—a non-smoker who had worked from 1962-81 in a smoke-filled, poorly ventilated Stockholm office—brought suit under a Swedish law that allows a disease to be classified as an occupational injury if the victim has been exposed at the workplace to agents known to cause the disease, provided there is no major evidence to the contrary...

...Life and Breath Geneva—Efforts by two Scandinavian countries to discourage the use of tobacco have been cited with approval by the recently concluded World Health Assembly, the policy-making body of the United Nations World Health Organization (who...

...The who itself has begun insisting that all UN organizations take steps to protect the health of nonsmokers on their premises...

...While cautioning that this can only be measured over a period of many years, the wHOspokesman did point to a study showing that, among European male doctors, a49 per cent reduction in smoking between 1954-71 was accompanied by a 25 per cent decrease in deaths from lung cancer.—Thomas 1 ami...

...But Norway is about to go much further...

...In Norway tough new measures are being prepared to restrict smoking...

...and in Sweden a landmark judicial decision has awarded compensation to the children of a woman who allegedly developed lung cancer as a result of exposure to cigarette smoke in the workplace...

...In the final ruling earlier this year, Sweden's Insurance Court of Appeal decided in favor of the plaintiff, and ordered compensation to cover the funeral expenses of the victim as well as an annuity for each of her children (equal to 20 per cent of her annual salary...

...There is some cause for optimism...

...Legislative proposals now being drafted would grant health authorities sweeping powers to prohibit smoking in public places...

...According to a who study, the proportion of Norwegian males who smoke dropped from 52 per cent in 1973 to 40 per cent in 1982...

...it is also expected to figure in the demands of labor world-wide when they negotiate over working conditions...

...In neighboring Sweden, where strong health warnings on cigarette packs were introduced in 1975, the percentage of daily smokers in the population dropped from 43 to 31 in five years...