Letter: On the day you featured a lady celebrating her 100th birthday with champagne and a cigarette, your headline reported that firemen are being ordered to allow two hours to elapse before attending a house in which someone has been smoking.

If smoking causes cancer, political correctness must cause brain damage!

“Secondary smoking” is a term coined by the medical profession to explain away the incidence of cancer among those who have never smoked. What utter claptrap!

Are we seriously expected to believe that while centenarians have smoked for 90 years without succumbing to the disease, exposure to a wisp of exhaled smoke might bring about the demise of a fit and healthy fireman?

We are already witnessing the destruction of traditional social environments due to the smoking ban on licensed premises. Are we now to be allowed to fry in house fires while firemen wait for tobacco smoke to clear?

The firemen are victims of those who seem hell bent on turning us into a nation of namby pambies.

Alan V Harrison, Julian Close, Great Wyrley.