Video Highlights Casino Workers' Health Plight [1]
Submitted by Anne Landman [2] on
Roswell Park Cancer Institute and the public health advocacy group Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights have posted a YouTube video [3] about the plight of casino workers, some of the last employees in the country forced to breathe secondhand cigarette smoke [4] at work. The powerful eight-minute video shows non-smoking casino workers who are ill and dying [5] from prolonged on-the-job exposure to secondhand smoke. An attractive, young non-smoking former casino dealer with an obvious scar on her neck, Sheryl Wilkens, in a hoarse voice describes how she stuck with her job to pay bills while she raised her family. She tearfully tells how in 2006 she developed a lump on her neck, and a subsequent biopsy revealed she had cancer, even though she never smoked. Another worker, a former marathon runner, describes the decline in her health, and how she is now permanently on medication for a number of respiratory diseases caused by her chronic smoke exposure at work. Workers in the multi-billion-dollar gambling industry suffer the highest occupational exposure to secondhand smoke of any workers in the country, and have consistently been left behind as the rest of the country has gone smoke-free as the gambling industry fights to preserve smoking in casinos.