Friday 11th April 2008
Smokers have been warned that it is unlikely they will succeed in lying to life insurance providers.
Public health campaign group Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) explains that there are ways in which life insurance companies can identify smokers.
Amanda Sandford, research manager at ASH, says: "There are easy ways of testing whether people really are smokers or ex-smokers."
These include tests for the presence of carbon monoxide in the lungs of an applicant, she suggests.
Ms Sandford claims that smokers will typically have a higher level of carbon monoxide in the air they breathe out.
However, she concedes that it is possible to defraud such tests - but advises that smoking addicts could find it difficult to do so.
In order to pass a medical with results akin to those of a non-smoker, for example, she predicts that a regular smoker would have to go for up to a week without a cigarette to allow the levels of nicotine in their body to return to normal.
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