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Bar and restaurant simulations

General Discussion

Neil -
I echo Martin's comments: thank you for putting this info on-line, and for your earlier work on outdoor smoking. With legislative moves towards non-smoking in bars and similar premises in Australia, there is now a lively debate (which, with the exception of Queensland, health interests are not generally winning) about how enclosed or unenclosed a place should be before before smoking is permitted/prohibited.

We actually have laws which say that as long as a place is more than 25% open (perimeter walls + ceiling, or sometimes just a % of wall area), it's OK to smoke.

Policy officers have been unable to find relevant information which associates degree of enclosedness with level of passive smoking exposure/risk for customers and staff.

Is it possible for your simulator, which seems to be based on S and NS rooms in the same airspace, to also consider how the degree of enclosedness might also impact on health risks, with various factors (number of cigarettes/hr, total room occupancy, room size, size & location of openings, ventilation rate, etc.) to play with, and utilising some of the risk work by Repace or others?

Thank you -

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Open Bars

Hi Margo,

You're right that my bar simulation is only for enclosed rooms. Do you know if there are any data at all supporting the "25% open" criteria? For example, has anyone measured the persistence of pollutants on a patio? In our work at Stanford (with Wayne Ott), we found that, during smoking, more enclosed patios can apparently trap smoke and lead to higher levels. But as soon as smoking stops, the levels disappear regardless of the "openness". The air exchange rate is extremely large, even if you have only one wall open. The effect we are seeing is something we call the "proximity effect" and does not depend on an apparent "air exchange rate" but on the direction and intensity of wind and the distance from a smoker. Enclosed patios tend to have lower non-directional wind patterns so that smoke sticks around longer. On the other hand if you are downwind from a smoker, even on an open patio, your exposure can also be quite high. So, I'm not sure the "openness" factor is really the best yardstick.

In addition to distance and wind direction, exposure depends on number of sources. It is possible to take our empirical results for a single smoker on a sidewalk or patio and linearly extrapolate them for multiple smokers -- creating a simulation where one can specify the number of smokers and the amount of time spent downwind or in an enclosed patio near one or more of the smokers. I may try to do this soon. To get bans instituted it may be enough to point out that exposure can be quite high in enclosed places, as well as open places. Our upcoming outdoor smoke paper makes this point. I am currently working hard on getting the final draft of the (long overdue) paper finished, hopefully submitting to the journal this month or early next month.

Regarding the estimation of risk: I am not the most up on this, but I would be interested in trying to add something to the simulations. I may try to pull Jim in and get his help. For now, we are using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's ambient air quality standards as a way to judge the potential adverse health effects of specific exposures.

Thanks for your interest,

Neil

  • By Neil Klepeis at 2006-02-14 16:36
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