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[taldarus]

 

NP

EDIT: Just read through post more thoroughly. Perfume and any smell CAN be serious, but comparing it to any smoke emitting object is a stretch. Better to pick on most peoples cooking rather than perfume.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Exposure to household air pollution (cookstove smoke) leads to roughly 4 million premature deaths each year and is the 4th worst health risk in the world so EPA works to improve health, livelihood, and quality of life by reducing exposure to air pollution, primarily among women and children, from household energy use. (EPA: Cookstove)

Cars are not significant, assuming modern car design. Their toxic emissions are SUPER low anymore. I would feel perfectly safe behind any 2010+ car and probably even back to 2000 a little. A better candidate is lawn-care equipment. Lawn mowers, hedge trimmers, and the like are super heavy polluters compared to cars, being unfiltered and relatively crude engine designs as a whole. Also people tend to poorly maintain them, and use them for 10-50 years. Modern cars are ten times safer than just a little lawn mower.

AC is hardly significant, I have discussed this with actual professionals, and have heard nothing about A/C being bad. In fact it's incredibly useful for long term human health and safety. More than enough to offset the dangers from it's emissions. BUILDINGS as a whole are the biggest polluter, but assuming modern US design practices, not significantly dangerous. Even Coal Power is relatively clean anymore (I think that their emissions are 99.9% clean, so safer to stand on top of a coal plant's chimney than stand next to a smoker, IMO)

Nuclear power is still the best bet for "clean" energy (Wiki: Radiotrophic fungi)

If you live in the US or Europe, odds are your biggest 'danger' is probably not smoking, because 5-10 minutes of exposure to cigarette smoke is negligible over the course of 8 hours. However, if the background levels are even slightly elevated, and most indoor facilities are. Odds are good most of you live with a background level of 50-80 in your house/apartment, depending on how often you clean, how careful you are about venting the air (if you don't use a/c), etc. So really, you probably are in more danger at home than around smokers.

Opening windows could only stir the PM back into the air, worsening the air quality. If you have a modern HVAC system (one that pulls air into your apartment from outside), you should use it frequently (again a/c probably does this).

Some EPA quotes (See: EPA: IAQ - but it gets quite technical, quite quickly)
Amount of Ventilation

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

If too little outdoor air enters a home, pollutants can accumulate to levels that can pose health and comfort problems. Unless they are built with special mechanical means of ventilation, homes that are designed and constructed to minimize the amount of outdoor air that can "leak" into and out of the home may have higher pollutant levels than other homes. However, because some weather conditions can drastically reduce the amount of outdoor air that enters a home, pollutants can build up even in homes that are normally considered "leaky".

How Does Outdoor Air Enter a House?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Outdoor air enters and leaves a house by: infiltration, natural ventilation, and mechanical ventilation. In a process known as infiltration, outdoor air flows into the house through openings, joints, and cracks in walls, floors, and ceilings, and around windows and doors. In natural ventilation, air moves through opened windows and doors. Air movement associated with infiltration and natural ventilation is caused by air temperature differences between indoors and outdoors and by wind. Finally, there are a number of mechanical ventilation devices, from outdoor-vented fans that intermittently remove air from a single room, such as bathrooms and kitchen, to air handling systems that use fans and duct work to continuously remove indoor air and distribute filtered and conditioned outdoor air to strategic points throughout the house. The rate at which outdoor air replaces indoor air is described as the air exchange rate. When there is little infiltration, natural ventilation, or mechanical ventilation, the air exchange rate is low and pollutant levels can increase. Read more about ventilation in buildings

Ventilation in Buildings Quote

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Since indoor air quality depends on many factors, including source strengths, moisture control, and thermal parameters, these ventilation requirements cannot guarantee good indoor air quality, but meeting these requirements is a sign of managing for good indoor air quality, where unusual counter currents or sources are present, they should be controlled at the source.

The outdoor air flow requirements of ASHRAE Standard 62-1999 are usually specified as cfm/occupant. The occupancy value should be the actual occupancy of the space or, for new buildings, the design occupancy. The total outdoor airflow is given by:

This Edit got a bit big

[Dorsidwarf]

If your colleagues smoke indoors at work and you don't feel like registering an official complaint, showing up at the office with a gas-mask gets the point across nicely.

[i2amroy]

I'm not saying that.

I just think that complaining about 'your smoke is bad for me' is very much nitpicking, because the risk of passive smoke pales in statistical comparison to the risk of other pollutants, up to a degree that science would classify as 'insignificant'.
It's not unthinkable that (the cycloid aromatics in) an old lady's perfume is more damaging to my health that someone smoking next to me.

Just be honest and say "I am irritated by your smoke" or "it stinks!", and I will politely apologize and put it out. Just don't come with that "my health" bs.

The adjusted lung cancer incidence rates were 30 percent higher (RR = 1.3 [95 percent CI, 0.6–2.7]) among women whose husbands were former smokers and 90 percent higher (RR = 1.9 [95 percent CI, 1.0–3.5]) among women whose husbands were current smokers compared with women married to nonsmokers.

Any secondhand smoke exposure in the workplace was associated with increased risks among both men (OR = 1.89 [95 percent CI, 0.53–6.67]) and women (OR = 1.57 [95 percent CI, 0.80–3.06]) (Table 7.3). In men and women combined, a significant trend of an increase in risk of lung cancer was evident with more years of secondhand smoke exposure at work. For example, adults who were exposed to less than 30 years of secondhand smoke at work had an OR of 1.40, and those who had been exposed for 30 or more years had an OR of 2.21 (p for trend = 0.03). When they considered hours of exposure per day in the workplace, the investigators found that the trends in risks associated with secondhand smoke exposure were strengthened slightly: the OR was 1.27 for persons who were exposed for less than 30 hour-years1, and the OR was 2.51 for those who were exposed for 30 or more hour-years (p for trend = 0.01).

Persons with a high secondhand smoke exposure during childhood, with exposures from other sources during adulthood including workplace, public transportation, and other public places, and persons with a high total of associated secondhand smoke exposures in childhood and in adulthood had a twofold to threefold increase in risk.

And that's just from the "cancer in adults" section. Here's the whole report. Fact of the matter is that yes, second-hand smoke exposure contributes a statistically significant increase in death and disease rates, regardless of what you might think otherwise. (And yeah, I'm replying to something that's from a month ago, blame it on Dorsidwarf for posting here ).