Marlene Sharp

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In May 2001, Marlene Sharp, a former barmaid at the Port Kembla RSL Club at the Port Kembla Hotel who was a non-smoker, was awarded more than $450,000 in damages after a jury agreed that her throat cancer was caused by passive smoking at work.

Ms. Sharp worked as a barmaid for 20 years and was diagnosed with throat cancer in May 1995. She was warned by her doctors to quit working in an environment in which secondhand smoke was present. Sharp reportedly stated that she disliked the smell of tobacco smoke while working behind the bar but was unaware of the purported health effects of ETS exposure. Attorneys for the bar owners defended her employer by saying that it is "fanciful to suggest" that hoteliers were aware in the 1970s that ETS has a "significant deleterious effect" on employees.

Opposing Sharp in the courts was the law firm Clayton Utz, which used to represent the now disbanded Tobacco Institute, the tobacco industry's lobbying group.

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