Stay in bed during the next "no smoking day" if you want to stay healthy. Such is the message from UK researchers who found that non-fatal accidents at work jumped on Britain's national kick-the-habit day.
As any smoker who tried to ban the butt could tell you, both mood and mental performance suffer immediately after the withdrawal of the weed.
Dr Andrew J. Waters, of London's National Addiction Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, and Dr Martin J. Jarvis and Dr Stephen R. Sutton, of the department of epidemiology and public health at University College, London, decided to study if the withdrawal of nicotine increased accident rates at work.
The results of their work, published this morning in Nature, suggest that more accidents happen on the second Wednesday of March, Britain's national "no smoking day" (NSD). They looked at Wednesdays both before and after NSD to establish if there was anything special about the week, and at days before and after in case Wednesdays are when bad things always happened.
Their measure was based on non-fatal accidents at work reported to the Health and Safety Executive. Companies must notify the executive of any accident causing a major injury or an injury which forces a person out of work for more than three days.
Their results suggest that NSD was not the day to be counting on colleagues who had stopped smoking. Figures from 1987-96 showed that 676 accidents on average were recorded on NSD, compared with 563 the Wednesday before and 518 the Wednesday after. There were also fewer accidents on the Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday of NSD week.
"We stress that the NSD effect, if real, should not be construed as indicating that cessation attempts on No Smoking Day are a bad idea, although it may suggest that wider use of nicotine replacement might be beneficial," the authors conclude. The research also highlighted that Monday accident rates were usually higher than on any other day.
