The bedrock for PA’s ban is the 1993 EPA study that found less than 1 extra cancer per thousand nonsmoking worker lifetimes of exposure in poorly ventilated 1940s-’70s “MAD MEN” type smokey work conditions.

To be exact, the EPA found a 19% increase over a 00.3% base rate(i.e. three cases/thousand nonexposed nonsmokers — EPA & American Cancer Society refs footnoted below). The rate for such workers exposed to 80,000 hours of lifetime work smoke would thus go up to 00.36% — an increase of 00.06%: Instead of finding 30 cancers among 10,000 workers, there’d be 36.

So if there are 10,000 PA full-time gaming floor casino workers with 2,000 in the smoking sections for 40 years straight we would see about 1 extra future cancer per year among those 10K workers. Even that 1 might disappear if we allowed for medical advances and accounted for today’s ventilation/filtration technology advances over MAD MEN era offices. In reality of course, current workers likely have an atmosphere only 20% or so as smokey as in those old conditions… which means only ONE EXTRA CASE OF CANCER EVERY FIVE YEARS, 20 to 40 YEARS IN THE FUTURE, under present conditions with NO advances made at all!

Yes, avoiding one possible extra death in PA’s workforce every five years would be a worthwhile goal: but two other factors come in:

1) The job losses from the ban would likely produce income losses translating into ten or twenty times as many deaths.

and

2) Even this very VERY small chance of an extra death would disappear if the EPA used NORMAL statistical procedures. Their study failed at that level so they “moved the goal post” and DOUBLED their error margin!

The bottom line is that the “Threat To Workers” is simply being used as a gaming device itself to push the Great American Antismoking Crusade one step closer to its final goal of eradicating smoking and smokers from the face of the Earth.

– MJM, not a fan of Crusaders OR Liars…
References:
EPA Report: https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2014-09/documents/passive_smoke.pdf
ACS Report: https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/164/12/1233/76936

To be exact, the EPA found a 19% increase over a 00.3% base rate(i.e. three cases/thousand nonexposed nonsmokers — EPA & American Cancer Society refs footnoted below). The rate for such workers exposed to 80,000 hours of lifetime work smoke would thus go up to 00.36% — an increase of 00.06%: Instead of finding 30 cancers among 10,000 workers, there’d be 36.

So if there are 10,000 PA full-time gaming floor casino workers with 2,000 in the smoking sections for 40 years straight we would see about 1 extra future cancer per year among those 10K workers. Even that 1 might disappear if we allowed for medical advances and accounted for today’s ventilation/filtration technology advances over MAD MEN era offices. In reality of course, current workers likely have an atmosphere only 20% or so as smokey as in those old conditions… which means only ONE EXTRA CASE OF CANCER EVERY FIVE YEARS, 20 to 40 YEARS IN THE FUTURE, under present conditions with NO advances made at all!

Yes, avoiding one possible extra death in PA’s workforce every five years would be a worthwhile goal: but two other factors come in:

1) The job losses from the ban would likely produce income losses translating into ten or twenty times as many deaths.

and

2) Even this very VERY small chance of an extra death would disappear if the EPA used NORMAL statistical procedures. Their study failed at that level so they “moved the goal post” and DOUBLED their error margin!

The bottom line is that the “Threat To Workers” is simply being used as a gaming device itself to push the Great American Antismoking Crusade one step closer to its final goal of eradicating smoking and smokers from the face of the Earth.

– MJM, not a fan of Crusaders OR Liars…