The Environmental Protection Agency is standing by its finding that secondhand tobacco smoke causes cancer despite a federal judge's decision striking down its 1993 report that made the link.
Although lawyers were still reviewing the ruling handed down by U.S. District Judge William Osteen in North Carolina, officials said Sunday an appeal is all but a certainty.
Osteen, acting on a lawsuit filed by the tobacco industry, ruled the EPA based its 1993 report on inadequate science and failed to demonstrate a statistically significant relationship between secondhand smoke and lung cancer.
"The decision is disturbing," EPA Administrator Carol Browner said Sunday. "We believe the health threats to children and adults from breathing secondhand smoke are very real."
The EPA's controversial 1993 report on environmental tobacco smoke concluded that secondhand tobacco smoke should be classified as a Class A carcinogen and was responsible for more than 3,000 lung-cancer deaths a year.
Although the agency never issued formal regulations to control secondhand smoke, the report has been cited widely in decisions by state and local officials to restrict smoking in public places including restaurants, airliners, offices and in California -- even bars.
Some of the restrictions could be in jeopardy should the finding Osteen issued late Friday stand. The litigation had been under way for five years.
Asked about the decision on "Fox News Sunday," Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala said: "No one wants to go back to smoking on airplanes, smoking in restaurants. No one wants to go back to polluting indoors."
She said science supports classifying secondhand tobacco smoke as a carcinogen. She said the government must "look at very carefully" the relationship between the scientific evidence and the conclusions of the EPA's 1993 report.
EPA spokeswoman Loretta Ucelli told The Associated Press that agency attorneys were reviewing the decision, but they "tell us the decision was based largely on procedural grounds."
Osteen, a judge in the Middle District of North Carolina, ruled that the EPA followed improper procedure in compiling its report by not including industry in its deliberations as required by the 1986 Radon Gas and Indoor Air Quality Research Act. That's the law used to support the secondhand tobacco smoke decision.
In striking down the EPA finding, Osteen wrote:
"EPA publicly committed to a conclusion before research had begun; excluded industry by violating the (radon law's) procedural requirements; (and) adjusted established procedure and scientific norms to validate the agency's public conclusions."
The judge further criticized the EPA for having "aggressively utilized" the report's findings "to establish a de facto regulatory scheme intended to restrict plaintiff's products and to influence public opinion."
The Washington Post first reported Osteen's ruling Sunday.
The 1993 report was immediately challenged by the tobacco industry in its lawsuit filed in North Carolina.
"We feel vindicated by the federal court's decision that the EPA wrongly classified secondhand smoke as a cause of cancer in nonsmokers," Charles A. Blixt, executive vice president and general counsel of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., said Sunday. "This decision should prevent the EPA from becoming a participant in the anti-smoking industry's crusade to ban smoking.
"The court's ruling supports Reynolds Tobacco's long-held belief that science does not justify public smoking bans."
While credible scientific authorities are united in agreement that smoking causes cancer, the extent of the hazard posed to nonsmokers from smoke exhaled by other people remains controversial.
Some scientists argue that secondhand smoke produces such low concentrations of cancer-causing carcinogens that a conclusive connection to a significant increase in cancer risk has not been established. Others maintain that the exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke is so widespread that even a small increase translates into a large number of people being put at additional cancer risk.
Although the EPA report has been central in the secondhand smoke debate, an attorney for flight attendants who won a $349 million settlement in February involving secondhand smoke in airliners said he didn't expect the ruling to affect the case.
"There is no legitimate question in the scientific community that secondhand smoke is a Class A carcinogen," said attorney Stanley Rosenblatt. "For a judge to come along years later and decide that it's not or is still an open question is a sad commentary."
"People have got to realize that the decision comes from tobacco
country. ... Coming from North Carolina, people expect that." 