QUANTIFYING THE AMOUNT OF CIGARETTE SMOKE GENERATED FROM POPULAR BRANDS OF CIGARETTES TO HELP ESTIMATE RISK AND EXPOSURE TO COMPONENTS OF SECOND-HAND SMOKE

摘要

As Industrial Hygienists we are often asked to make quick assessments of situations to determine their relative safety. This is often difficult to do, since real event quantitative data is needed to compare with existing exposure standards. One such situation is determining the exposures of individuals in a tobacco, smoke-filled room. The amount of smoke being generated by the occupants would be a helpful number in making some basic exposure assessments. In our experiment, we evaluated the amount of smoke produced per gram of tobacco by four major brands of American cigarettes. Each cigarette was weighed and measured; the tobacco burned off; and the ash weighed. The difference between the weight of the tobacco and the weight of the ash was the weight of the smoke.We were able to derive the average amount of smoke in grams produced per gram of tobacco and the average amount of smoke produced per cigarette used in this experiment. These numbers may be helpful to the Industrial Hygienists in the field who are trying to evaluate exposures of individuals to cigarette smoke and in their effort to provide health and safety advice.