Children are contracting serious illnesses because of their parents smoking at home, says the government’s chief medical officer, who has warned adults not to light up in front of their sons and daughters.

In an interview with The Observer, Sir Liam Donaldson, Britain’s most senior doctor, pledged that there would be a further sustained crackdown on smoking after the ban comes into force in England next Sunday.

He promised renewed public health advertising campaigns to try to educate parents who smoke. ‘We will strengthen and make regular the message to parents about the risks to their children of smoking. This is something we will need to constantly remind them about.

‘The dangers of parents smoking in front of their children are increased risk of respiratory diseases, bronchitis, middle ear infections, asthma attacks in children that are prone to asthma and increased risk to babies if there is a pregnant person in the household.

‘While the number of parents who smoke is falling, children’s exposure to parental smoke remains “a problem area”, he said.

Future plans to restrict smoking include

Removing cigarettes from public display;

Putting graphic picture warnings on cigarette packets showing the health effects of smoking, including blocked arteries, rotten teeth and gangrene;

Outlawing the sale of packets of 10 cigarettes to deter consumption, especially among children;

Reducing the number of cigarettes that Britons can bring into the country from inside the EU from 3,200 to 200.

The number of Britons who smoke has fallen to 24 per cent and ministers hope going smoke-free will over time bring about another 4 or 5 per cent drop. ‘But if we want to go further we have got to reinforce all these other tobacco measures and denormalise smoking completely,’ said Donaldson.

‘The first of July is not when action stops; it’s a launchpad from which we can make further massive strides. I hope people will be behind some of the slightly controversial measures.’

He wants cigarettes to be hidden away in shops. ‘If you walk into the average supermarket one of the things that confronts you straight away is a wall of cigarettes. That’s unhelpful. I’d like to see them remove the wall of cigarettes and keep them under the counter,’ said Donaldson.

‘Some people would resent the idea of cigarettes being kept under the counter like magazines that you wouldn’t want displayed. But I think that these are all part of the denormalisation process. Supermarkets are big, responsible organisations which already try to help on things like obesity. Wouldn’t they like to strike another blow for health and play their part on a disease that still kills over 100,000 a year?’

Health campaigners last night welcomed Donaldson’s pledges. Professor John Britton, a consultant in respiratory medicine and chair of the Royal College of Physicians’ tobacco advisory group, said: ‘If you take care of your child and do the things responsible parents do, such as making sure your child is safe in the car, to then smoke in the same building as them is irrational and irresponsible. To do that is a serious assault on the children’s health and wellbeing.’

Dr Vivienne Nathanson, head of science and ethics at the British Medical Association, said ensuring cigarettes became an under-the-counter product would help reduce smoking among children. ‘We know that there’s a potent link between children recognising cigarette packets, for example through their colours, and starting to smoke,’ she said. ‘So the less they see, the less they will recognise and the less likely they will be to see tobacco as an aspirational product.’

Simon Clark, director of smokers’ rights group Forest, criticised the proposals. ‘It’s wrong to draw an automatic correlation between children seeing parents smoke and then assuming that they will take up smoking. There’s a generation of people today who grew up in an era when a lot of adults smoked yet many of them are non-smokers. It’s incredibly hypocritical of government to try to denormalise smoking and vilify smoking and imply that it’s an anti-social activity given the enormous amount of tax the government makes from tobacco.’

Three people who kept an epileptic man in a locked garden shed for four months were given lengthy prison sentences today after it emerged that their victim was beaten, burned and humiliated over a minor debt.

Kevin Davies, 29, was found dead by paramedics in the kitchen of the home of David Lehane and Amanda Baggus on September 26 last year.

He had been held in a shed bolted from the outside in the garden of the house in Bream, Gloucestershire, between May and September 2006, during which time he was repeatedly assaulted and fed on leftovers and scraps such as potato peelings.

Tests revealed there was weed killer in his body and he had extensive bruising covering his body, as well as burn marks that a pathologist said could have been caused by a hot knife. His ribs and larynx were fractured and burns covered 10% of his body.

Baggus kept a diary in which she chronicled the punishments they had meted out to their vulnerable victim and scornfully recorded his cries for help.

They also filmed him inside the shed, bullying him into saying he was staying there voluntarily and was being treated well, in a disturbing hostage-style video in which he seemed frightened, emaciated and weak.

Lehane, 35, Baggus, 26, and their lodger Scott Andrews, 27, had originally been charged with murder, but the charge was dropped after experts were unable to rule out that epilepsy may have contributed to his death. However, it is unlikely that his death had been caused by his medical condition.

In May this year, the three defendants pleaded guilty to false imprisonment and assault occasioning actual bodily harm. Lehane and Baggus were each given 10-year sentences by Mr Justice Gray at Bristol crown court, and Andrews was given nine years.

The judge said what they had done had been “truly appalling and utterly inhumane”.

He said of Mr Davies: “Since the death of his father in March 2006, his life is said to have lacked structure. He needed sympathetic treatment, but what you meted out to him over many weeks was the very opposite of that.”

Ian Pringle, prosecuting, told the court that Mr Davies had been treated like an animal.

“What emerged from the investigation into Kevin Davies’ death was that he had effectively been held captive at the home of the defendants for a period of nearly four months,” he said. “That he had been abused for that period of time. He had been assaulted, he had been beaten and he had effectively been kept like a dog in a locked garden shed at night.

“In short, the last few months of this man’s life must have been utterly miserable and inhumane.”

Mr Davies, who suffered from severe epilepsy, had been described in court as gullible, naive and vulnerable. He had known Lehane and Baggus for some years but had fallen out with them after a car crash in May last year.

The court heard that Baggus had blamed Mr Davies after a car overturned, and that this incident kickstarted their systematic torture and abuse. She felt he owed her money and considered this was a good enough reason to keep him at their address while she helped herself to his social security money to pay household bills and debts.

In one barely literate diary entry, dated August 5, she wrote: “He was playing up last nite, banging in the shed. So later that night both Scott and Dave hit Prick until quite late, cause Prick made a load of shouting.”

Patrick Harrington, defending Lehane, said “things had got out of hand” but said it had been “an unsophisticated enterprise”. He said Mr Davies was homeless and an alcoholic and was grateful to be allowed to stay in the shed.

Detective chief inspector Geoff Brookes, of Gloucestershire police, described the defendants’ behaviour as extraordinary and bizarre. “Only they can say exactly what motivated them,” he said.

In a statement, Mr Davies’ family said: “Although nothing can compensate us for Kevin’s death, we feel the sentences validate our faith in British justice.”

Neighbours in the village said they could not believe they had no idea what was happening.

On one occasion, a boy kicked a football near to the shed, causing his captors to go berserk. The boy’s older brother said: “In a few seconds of him being up there looking in the garden, they were out coming on the estate, shouting and raving, using dreadful language - totally inappropriate - just basically going crazy over someone going near to their garden.”

The shed has since been replaced by the new tenants of the house.

GENERATION X’ers stand to lose as much as $1300 a year in superannuation and might even have to put off their retirements because of delayed action on climate change and carbon trading, an analysis has concluded.

According to modelling done by the Climate Institute, the crunch will come in the 2020s.

This will hit those people in the workforce now aged between 36 and 46, particular the 42-43-year-olds. Women will be hit even harder because they will need more money given that they tend to live longer.

But a delay is unlikely to affect superannuation holdings of Generation Y generally defined as those born between 1979 and 2000 as they will not retire until much later. Indeed, they might even benefit from delayed action.

Today’s retirees will not be affected.

However, the analysis is conservative because it does not take into account the economic impacts of climate-change-induced weather patterns such as cyclones, storms, rising seas and drought.

Goldman Sachs JBWere and AMP Capital contributed to the modelling, which found that delayed action might force superannuants to work longer to build up their funds.

According to the analysis, delayed versus early action on carbon trading resulted in a difference of 3 per cent in share prices at peak times.

The Federal Government has announced it intends to set up a domestic cap-and-trade scheme for greenhouse gas emissions in 2011 or 2012.

But Climate Institute chief executive John Connor said the Government’s cap-and-trade plans might not be enough to protect super funds as there was simply not enough detail.

“We still have to see exactly what it means,” Mr Connor said. “We’re struggling because we don’t have clear targets from the Government on the table. What they’re talking about is a trading scheme that has all got sorts of cushions and price caps.”

He said that if the carbon price was too low and there were no renewable energy targets, big polluting power stations would be likely to attract investment.

“We just don’t think that’s going to be enough to make the transition that we need. It’s kind of a 21st century protectionism for an energy economy.”

At this week’s leaders summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum, Prime Minister John Howard is expected to advocate non-binding targets to reduce carbon emissions.

«www.climateinstitute.org.au»