Passive smoking: science or alchemy?
One of the hardest-hitting advertising campaigns on passive smoking in Europe has been unveiled in Scotland. The TV commercial shows a woman sitting in a smoke-filled bar, then being treated in hospital and, in the last image, dying from cancer. It’s part of a £750,000 advertising blitz ahead of the ban on smoking in all enclosed public places, which Scotland will launch in March.
Meanwhile, writing in The Times, former Scotsman editor Tim Luckhurst writes, "As MPs choose today between partial or total bans on smoking in public places they must ask themselves whether lying to promote a cause is ever legitimate. The question is urgent because the claim that secondary smoking kills is alchemy, not science, and honest anti-smoking lobbyists know it.
"The theory that cigarette smoke kills non-smokers was dreamt up 30 years ago by anti-smoking activists; only after inventing it did they attempt to prove it. Dozens of peer-reviewed scientific studies have followed. All point to a compelling consensus that there is no causal link between passive smoking and fatal illness."
Sources: Glasgow Herald, The Times (29 November 2005)
posted by Simon Clark @ 13:35
3 comments
3 Comments:
When the Department of Health declared a 3-month 'public consultation' on its proposed smoking ban 'in public places', it opened the floodgates for the army of militant pressure groups to regurgitate their stale statistics
of people killed by so-called 'passive smoking'.
Without waiting for the opening of the shooting season, the Royal College of Physicians bagged 12,000 phantom victims with a single press release.
They offered no evidence to support their reckless and mischievous assertions. All we get is an endless incantation of dubious sources: 'international
experts', 'comprehensive overview', 'medical, legal, economic. and ethical
aspects', 'unanswerable moral case', 'social inequalities', 'population and
individual-level interventions ' ...
In a press release running to over 500 words there was not a jot of evidence of a single person having died from other people's smoke. Nor is that surprising since the smoke from a cigarette or pipe is massively diluted in the
atmosphere, even without the help of modern ventilation and air
conditioning.
My smoke may irritate a minority of hyper-sensitive souls, but it is certainly not lethal.
The cunning trick of these intolerant anti-smoking missionaries is to describe the ordinary process of breathing - in the presence of a single
smoker - as 'passive smoking'. It's as though the campaigners against obesity chose to denounce the ordinary process of eating as 'passive weight-enhancing'.
Despite acres of print, dozens of studies, and decades of statistical
manipulation, these anti-smoking elites have failed again and again to establish a plausible case for a general ban on smoking.
The medical evidence for any injurious effect of passive smoking is so tenuous that similar evidence would not be seriously considered, let alone published, in any other medical discipline.
The average dose of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) received by the passive smoker, based on the evidence published by the US National Center for Environmental Health, is only 1/500th of that of the active smoker.
The increased risk for ETS-exposed non-smokers is alleged to be between 10 and 20%, but it is well established that even this increased risk may be due to misclassification of smoker status or lack of allowance for other confounding factors.
A recent Californian study of over 100,000 people, which had more strengths than many previous studies, showed no increased risks for either lung cancer or heart disease in non-smokers exposed to ETS.
The alleged increased risk for heart disease in ETS exposed non-smokers is 20 to 30% more than those not exposed. This is more than 100-fold greater than any theoretical risk based on the degree of exposure.
What we do know is that smokers, apart from smoking, have unhealthy lifestyles such as lack of exercise, increased intakes of saturated fat and decreased intakes of fruit, fresh vegetables, folate and fibre, all of which are strong risk factors for both heart disease and lung cancer.
Many of these risk factors are shared by non-smokers who live with smokers and any increased risk may be due to this. It is difficult even to reconcile any increased risk of heart disease for light active smokers.
In the Framingham study, a cornerstone of heart disease and smoking, smokers of less than 10 cigarettes a day had no increased risk for heart disease. In the British doctors' study over 50 years, female doctors who smoked less than 14 cigarettes a day also had no increased risk. Based on the average exposure for passive smokers of 1/500th of the active smoker, this equates to around 15 cigarettes a year, quite different to 10 or 14 a day.
Papers incriminating passive smoking with an increased risk for other diseases have also shown a lamentable lack of allowance for confounding factors.
Not one in 1000 doctors have read the 10,000 papers on passive smoking. They may glance at the abstracts if they have time, or perhaps they have better things to do. But unless they read and digest the body of the paper they are in no position to accept or reject the evidence.
The Government’s Scientific Committee on Tobacco & Health (SCOTH) is composed in the main of committed anti-smoking health professionals whose conclusions are a certainty before they are even discussed.
Unlike governments, courts of law will consider all the evidence on passive smoking, peer reviewed articles, and not just propaganda. If SCOTH and governments want to impose bans in order to reduce the incidence of active smoking, why in heavens’ name are they not honest about this, instead of inventing the myth of passive smoking?
Tim Luckhurst's essay is a useful summary of some very interesting facts from the scientific literature. I recommend we all read it.
The Government, the NHS and the British Heart Foundation amongst others need to get their facts straight. They either demonstrate a tendency for being taken in by inaccurate interpretation of statistics or a contempt for science, using it as a means to an end - the abolition of smoking.
Far from there being an absolute proven link between second-hand smoking and lung cancer there is an absolute absence of any such link.
Some sources have quoted the views of bereaved families, whose children have died, as support for a link between passive smoking and health. The BMA have canvassed its members for anecdotes from their practice to use in persuading MPs. These actions must be immoral as well as unscientific. Perhaps it would be more ethical to direct people to the scientific literature rather than attempting to explain it to them.
Perhaps these bodies should have a better understanding of the inherent inaccuracies of
epidemiological models. Perhaps they should read more widely. Figures quoted as to annual death rates from passive smoking in hospitality workers are estimates that are extrapolates from fallacious studies. They have however been so widely peddled that the truth has been distorted.
Even the evidence linking lung cancer to smoking is also open to criticism. Perhaps people should start to think for themselves rather than believe everything they hear that fits in with their views.
The certainty that there is only one right course of action regarding smoking bans is far from realistic. It is also a position that has been arrived at by unprecedented propaganda and successful attempts at brain-washing the naive.
There are many resources for finding facts. I suggest people look for themselves.
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