I stayed outside the operating room of a hospital in Beijing for five hours on Tuesday while the daughter of my close friend was undergoing open-heart surgery. Groups of five other families - some with as many as six or seven members - were also there, waiting for the outcome of their loved ones' surgery.

Since there is no special waiting room, all of us were crowded into a corridor linking the hospital wards for patients recovering from everything from bone fractures to urinary disease.

In five hours, I counted some 10 people - patients and their relatives - lighting up cigarettes and smoking right in the corridor or the stairways inside the hospital, oblivious to the huge glaring No-Smoking sign.

One patient wobbled out of the urinary ward with a burning cigarette in his left hand. His feet swollen, he walked only a few steps before spotting a vacant seat in the corridor. He sat down and continued puffing out smoke. Stunned, we all stared at him.

The elderly woman from Zhengzhou in Central China's Henan Province started coughing. But the man was just oblivious. Picking up her courage, the woman, whose husband was undergoing heart bypass surgery, told him to stop smoking.

"My husband never smokes," she told me. "I cough whenever I inhale secondhand smoke."

However, the man with swollen feet persisted, as rings of smoke flowed from his mouth. My husband and I as well as a few others joined the elderly woman in protest.

"You should have the good sense to smoke outside the hospital building instead of here among the non-smokers," I told him sternly.

Slowly, he got up and wobbled on into a side corridor to continue burning the last bit of his cigarette.

The way the man acted indicated how hard a battle we must fight on behalf of the 540 million Chinese exposed to secondhand smoke (SHS).

I don't think the man and the others who couldn't resist lighting up even inside a hospital are ignorant of the risks involved.

A national tobacco control report released on Tuesday sounded a loud alarm. Among those suffering from SHS, 180 million are under the age of 15. Besides children, women are also particularly susceptible to SHS, and about 100,000 of the 1 million Chinese who die each year from smoking-related diseases are the victims of second-hand smoke.

Of all the public places, hospitals should be the first smoke-free sanctuary, for the obvious reason that people not in good health are especially vulnerable to tobacco smoke.

This is supported by a 2006 study in seven cities in which 78.1 percent of non-smokers and even 75.5 percent of smokers supported banning smoking inside hospitals.

Some smokers are able to control themselves in public places and they do manage to withhold the urge to smoke for five hours while waiting outside an operating room. But what to do with people like the man with swollen feet and the few others I encountered just outside the operating room?

Aside from effective legislation and regulation, there should be effective enforcement. Hospitals especially should place patrols in critical places to stop people from lighting up cigarattes - both patients and visitors.

More importantly, the people who support smoke-free public places should unite to create intense public pressure and force smokers to refrain from lighting up in public.

E-mail: lixing@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 05/31/2007 page10)