The British Medical Association (BMA) said the "important study" confirmed that passive smoking kills.
Would you force a child to a life of ill health by passive smoking?
The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) said relaxing the ban would expose workers to passive smoking.
The SCOTH report offers guidance on passive smoking, addiction and marketing of tobacco products.
Professor Robert West, Cancer Research UK's director of tobacco studies, said society's attitude towards passive smoking "has to change".
Passive smoking increased their risk of hearing loss across all sound frequencies by about a third.
The research also revealed that passive smoking had a large impact on women, killing about 281, 000 worldwide.
Peers also heard questions on the death penalty, unpaid interns and passive smoking.
"We already know that active and passive smoking has severe health implications, " said Phillipa Major, its assistant director of research.
It said that this group was more exposed to passive smoking than any other group, principally in their own homes.
Worried about public health and the effects of passive smoking, ministers proposed a limited ban on smoking in restaurants and pubs serving food.
The team found people exposed to passive smoking for at least 22 hours a week increased their risk of a heart attack by around 45%.
The Health Promotion Agency (HPA) wants to see how the ban affects the levels of passive smoking in 500 non-smokers who share a home with smokers.
BBC: NEWS | UK | Northern Ireland | Passive smoking research planned
"Passive smoking is entirely avoidable and a private vehicle is one of the few places a child can still be legally exposed to tobacco smoke, " he said.
The Swiss Socialist party "deplored" the result, saying that better protection against passive smoking would have "incontestably been a major step in the improvement of (workers') conditions".
The poison emitted by passive smoking is minute and pales into insignificance when compared with the levels of carbon monoxide generated by aircraft, buses, trucks and cars.
There is a wide consensus among doctors that passive smoking is bad for health, although a paper published in the British Medical Journal did raise doubts about the link.
Outside the courts, the industry is also fighting legislators' moves to restrict advertising and smoking in public places, as more and more medical studies reveal the dangers of passive smoking.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office has cited studies suggesting that sitting three feet away from a smoker outdoors can expose people to the same passive smoking risk as would occur indoors.
He said estimates suggested that each year passive smoking in children accounted for more than 20, 000 cases of lower respiratory tract infection, 200 cases of bacterial meningitis, and 40 sudden infant deaths.
Passive smoking was almost unheard of 15 years ago - all of a sudden the media whip up a frenzy and smokers are ostracised and portrayed (on TV and in the paper) as killers?
Michael Siegel, professor of community health sciences at Boston University, wrote in the New York Times that the ban was "pointless" from a public health perspective and could, in fact, increase the risk of passive smoking by creating "smoke-filled areas" near park entrances.
It has long been the consensus in the medical profession that passive smoking is dangerous, so there was outrage when the British Medical Journal of May 17th published a study which found that non-smokers whose spouse smoked did not suffer lung cancer or other smoking-related diseases as a result.
We humans are subject to hyperbolic discounting, not taking full account of long distant future costs for current pleasures, sometimes those running the public health system really do know more than us, there are externalities associated with these behaviours (late night drunks, passive smoking and the visual pollution of someone 300 lbs overweight perhaps).
FORBES: Alcohol, Obesity and Smoking Do Not Cost Health Care Systems Money
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