THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, December 16, 1995 TAG: 9512160302
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: INDIANAPOLIS LENGTH: Short : 47 lines
For 18 years, Mildred Wiley was a nurse in the psychiatric ward at a Veterans Administration hospital, caring for patients who smoked so much that she often worked in a blue haze.
Last week, the U.S. Labor Department ordered the VA to pay her widower $21,500 a year until his death - half of her salary - in the first workers' compensation case in the nation linking secondhand smoke to a cancer death.
In the past, the government has awarded claims for respiratory illness and other ailments linked to secondhand smoke, said John Banzhaf, executive director of Action on Smoking and Health, a Washington-based anti-smoking group.
In Mildred Wiley's case, the Labor Department ruled Dec. 8 that secondhand smoke was partly to blame for her death from lung cancer in 1991. She didn't smoke. Nor does her husband.
``This is great news, even though this one at the moment is confined to workers' compensation,'' Banzhaf said. ``It will alert people to the fact that they can make a claim which they didn't think they could make before. Employers are going to say, `If we don't ban smoking, we could face future claims.' ''
Mildred Wiley's husband, Philip E. Wiley of Charlotte, N.C., also has sued seven large tobacco companies. The workers' compensation ruling is not admissible in court.
Michael York, a lawyer for Philip Morris, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes and a defendant in the lawsuit, said he doesn't expect the claim to affect Wiley's lawsuit.
``The ruling appears to be based on the opinion of a single medical professor and at trial we expect to present substantial medical testimony to rebut that opinion,'' York said.
Wiley's lawyer, Joe Young, said that patients at the VA hospital in Marion, about 60 miles northeast of Indianapolis, were allowed to smoke freely when Mildred Wiley worked there and that the ventilation was poor.
KEYWORDS: SECONDHAND SMOKE WORKERS COMPENSATION AWARD by CNB