I'm Dr. Javette Orgain, a family physician in Chicago. I treat patients of all ages, both sexes and many cultures. I see how tobacco use is destroying people in all walks of life every day. Today I'm going to give you several reasons to pass this clean indoor air ordinance, but they all lead to one conclusion… this is a critical step forward to protect the health of all Chicagoans.

Diseases caused by tobacco use are particularly damaging to African Americans

• According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 45,000 African Americans die from preventable tobacco-related diseases every year.
• The smoking-related mortality rate is 20 percent higher for blacks than whites, and lung cancer death rates are 50 percent higher for blacks.
• Tobacco related diseases add up to the #1 killer of blacks worldwide, more deaths than even HIV.

There is no question that tobacco is deadly for smokers, but also for non-smokers exposed to the smoke. Eliminating everyone's exposure to secondhand smoke in public places is a proven step forward in reducing the death toll that tobacco takes across the board.

A study by the Universities of California at San Francisco and Berkley found that smokers who work in communities with a strong clean indoor air ordinance were 38 percent more likely to quit than smokers working in communities with no ordinances. There are thousands of people in Chicago who want to quit smoking, and this will help them succeed.

Many of our young people work in Chicago's restaurants after school, on weekends and in the summertime. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in the fall of 2000 found that teens who work in smoke-free establishments were 32 percent less likely to smoke than those who worked in places with no smoking restrictions.

And finally we must pass this ordinance to protect our children. Chicago leads the nation in childhood deaths caused by asthma. Up to one million US children have aggravated asthma caused by second hand smoke and nearly one in five pediatric emergency room visits are asthma related. Second hand smoke causes 150,000 to 300,000 lower respiratory tract infections in toddlers, with 15,000 of those cases requiring hospitalization.

While all those are impressive facts and figures… let me tell you a story about one of my patients here in Chicago to give you a better sense of how this issue affects people everyday.