Secondhand smoke
I thought after my post about global warming, I’d avoid the more controversial issues for a while. But I couldn’t let this one go. Today I saw this CNN article about a new report by the Surgeon General. According to the article, he says “Exposure to secondhand smoke remains an alarming public health hazard” and “Nonsmokers need protection through the restriction of smoking in public places and workplaces”.
Later in the article, it mentions that this report “isn’t a new study but a compilation of the best research on secondhand smoke”. No, it isn’t a compilation of the best research because the best research is a 39-year study of 35,561 people who never smoked and had a spouse that smoked. And guess what the conclusion was?
The results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality, although they do not rule out a small effect. The association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than generally believed.
And remember, that study looked at people that lived with smokers, and therefore spent a lot of time indoors with them. But we can ignore that study because it was obviously funded by the Big Tobacco… wait, what’s that? It was funded by the American Cancer Society? Oh.
But, you’re probably saying, what about all the studies that say the opposite? The Surgeon General obviously is basing his conclusion on something. Yes, the problem is a great deal of the reports you see are based on an EPA report from 1993 that has been thoroughly discredited. In court even. But people keep on quoting from it, either because it suits their cause, or they just don’t realize it.
See this guy’s site for more details about the EPA study. He discusses the study and shows some quotations from the judge’s 92-page decision. But if you don’t feel like reading it, the basic idea is that the EPA:
- Selectively eliminated studies (such as the one mentioned above) from its report that didn’t agree with its conclusion, which it had already decided on ahead of time.
- Manipulated the statistics when they still didn’t get the conclusion they expected, decreasing the confidence level down to 90% instead of 95% to try to show a greater relative risk.
- Still only got a relative risk of 1.19, which is not statistically significant, yet they used this to claim that secondhand smoke causes cancer.
Pen & Teller did an episode of their show Bullshit that debunked the whole “secondhand smoke causes cancer” thing too. It was done around the time they had banned indoor smoking in New York City. Now it’s banned for the entire state. I’m a non-smoker. I love being able to go out and not have to breathe in smoke and not reek of smoke when I get home. But that would just be too bad for me.
What it comes down to is this: Yes, cigarettes cause cancer. But as with any carcinogen, you have to consider the dosage. Just because smoking causes cancer, it doesn’t mean secondhand smoke does.