Now some antis will use that poem to say the cancer wards are only filled with smokers, but that's pure horse-pucky. Even if they were, that still wouldn't be valid justification to ban all smoking in hospitals, but would rather show that action to be barbaric. They say that smokers are over represented in lung cancer cases with Harvard and the Mayo clinic claiming smokers comprise between 85-90% of lung cancer cases, but that is only because they group smokers and former smokers together, the latter including anyone who has ever smoked over 100 cigs in a lifetime. The fact is that age demographics for most lung cancer patients today means they come from the generation when over 50% of the population of the US smoked, back in the 50's and early 60's (and there were many former smokers back then too). So you would expect that over 60-70% of the population over the age of 15 some 40 some odd years ago in 1960 would fall into that group of smokers andformer smokers. Most lung cancers occur in people over the age of 50, according to Cornell.
The US was also a mostly industrial based economy 40 years ago, with extremely high levels of air pollution from factory based emissions. As the US transformed into a service and technology based economy, exporting the dirty manufacturing segments to cheaper labor markets in third world countries, the air pollution has cleared up. Anti-smokers base falling lung cancer rates solely on falling smoking rates, but the fact is there has been a steady increase in population and the pure numbers of smokers in the US has stayed pretty consistent at right around 50 million for the last 50 years. Yet the pure numbers of annual diagnosed lung cancer cases have continued to climb throughout the last 30 years and have only recently begun to level off. These numbers can easily be researched on the net for those in search of the truth, which is why I haven't provided specific links. If you do need help with any, just ask.
Another fact the antis will not admit is that all mammals get lung cancer. When was the last time anyone saw the sheep and the cows smoking up a storm behind the barn when Farmer Brown wasn't looking? Sheep also get a form of "contagious" lung cancer caused by a retro-virus which causes a malignancy similar to that of 25% of the lung cancer cases in humans. Lung cancer has also been linked to prevalence of viral diseases in humans, such as to the prevalence of human papillimoviral (HPV) infections in Okinawa.
I'm not trying to show that smoking isn't at all linked to lung cancer, but merely showing that those undertaking the present anti-smoking crusades seek to hide the truth about real risk and prevalence levels. There is absolutely no reason to ban smoking entirely in hospitals. To do so would be as I said before, simply barbaric.
Just goes to show the antis and their paid for legislators are barbarians.