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Originally Posted by Soulforged
Die of Cancer 1 in 500
Die in Car wreck 1 in 6,000
Yes, my mistake. I gave the chance of dying in a car accident per year, and not even that correctly. But my claim : "Very few common behaviours that are considered unhealthy lead to a similar increase" still stands.
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First I wonder why they lied and stated 20, some 40...
Who said that?
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Yes I've read them too, but the significance is not that significant. Even considering what it does, or what we think it does, to non-casual smokers, all passive smokers are casual smokers (or even a lesser degree). That has to have some relevance even for the more unwilling to accept that this ban is ridiculous.
Some passive smokers are indeed more than casual smokers. If you're living in a household with a heavy smoker, you're exposed to more tabacco smoke than a casual smoker. Of course, non-smokers like me who live alone and are exposed to tabacco smoke occasionally are not the issue. But it's established that the harm of smoke is dose dependent. That means that it's not that slight exposure has no effect but the effect is too small to be found with the usual studies. But again, that's not the issue. The issue is that smoking has a huge negative effect on the health of society.
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It's only a risk factor for both diseases, as many risk factors for other diseases, that we accept. I think that the main problem is the use of the word "cause" still, and that has pushed many people to believe that eliminating tabacco smoking will cause the rate of appearence of lung cancer to dicrease to a minimal, wich is untrue.
It would probably decrease by about 70%. And you can't have it both ways. Tabacco smoke either causes cancer or it's completely harmless. "To cause" does not mean that the effect has to appear in 100% of the cases. If we would use such a definition we would have to say that nothing causes cancer. It just miraculously appears. No cancerogene substance on earth has an effect rate on 100%. "To cause" means that the cause is connected to the effect in a causal way. The former brings the latter about. Hell, it's as if you would argue that sex doesn't cause pregnancy!
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They're not caused by, in a given case it could be that it was because of smoking or not, but many times non of those factors are recognized as the cause of the actual disease. That's an exageration. About the western world, that's the principal cause of death in men, and still there's the issue of cuasation by smoking tabacco. Now the ironical thing here is that it appears the quantity of smokers has been declaning in the most advanced countries, that includes great part of the western world.
Fallacy. The presence of the consequence while absence of the antecedent doesn't refute the implication.
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You said it yourself. Carbon Monoxyd is expelled by cars, combustion working cars. But agregate to that list other possible pathogens: nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, benzene, formaldehyde and polyciclic hidrocarbons.
And releasing any of them in a pub is illegal. Your point is?
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They only oppose this, there's no serious refutation, and seeing how the research carried out by the principal health agencies are biased, I'll seriously doubt those sources. From the same source: "In 1993, EPA labeled secondhand smoke a "known human carcinogen." This was based on its analysis of about 30 epidemiologic studies of secondhand smoke and lung cancer. But 80 percent of the studies did not support EPA's decision. So how did EPA justify its conclusion?
EPA performed a "meta-analysis" of the studies. That is, the relative risks from the 30 studies were weighted, pooled and an "average" relative risk of 1.19 was calculated. And EPA concluded that secondhand smoke increased lung cancer risk 19 percent."
A meta-analysis is a statistical procedure to pool multible studies. Even if 100% of the studies had not supported the EPA's decision, a meta-analysis may come to different result because the statistical power increases. Meta-anaylses are legit procedures that are used in many fields in science. There were concerns about possible bias in this study, that is why an independent team of researchers re-analized the data adjusting for bias. They still found a significant result.
You can find a link to the study here (#12):
Science Direct
There you'll also find dozens of other studies finding statistical evidence for the harm of passive smoking.
The original study found an excess risk for people living with a smoker of 24%. The re-analysis corrected this to 19% because of the adjustment to publication bias. As you can see, the EPA quickly adopted the corrected numbers.
Because of its size and its scrutiny this corrected study can be seen as the current answer on the question whether environmental smoke causes lung cancer. Because of that, we can say that any claims that no evidence exists for this causation are definitely untrue.
However, it's true that the effect sizes of passive smoking on lung cancer are surprisingly small. From the studies under the link above emerges the interesting picture that while lung cancer is the main pathology connected to active smoking (but by far not the only one) for passive smoking more important pathologies seem to be cardivasculair diseases and breast cancer.
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First it's not exactly to defend smoking, he also says that it's dangerous and recommends not to do it more than occasionally, however, what he wants is to put things as they're. Second, and from the source (again, not the one that you saw, but the next -the one in the hyperlink "interesting source"): "It is not surprising that the WHO is now the vehicle to expand this economy of loot at global level. But reality has not changed: while the WHO is barking its absurd tobacco-related mortality figures based on statistical assumptions dictated by a political agenda, real science still has no proof for the WHO's claims." The propaganda machine, WHO.. About the WHO study of 1998.
Ahh, the WHO conspires with the World Bank to take over the world. It's all obvious to me now ~:rolleyes:
Come on, that's a conspiracy theory. About the WHO study of 1998: they claim the WHO lied in their press release, but I can't see in which way. The press release seems entirely correct to me.
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I agree that part was not exactly professional. About the study on rodents. That's exactly what the excerpt said, they simply couldn't, not that it's relevant because mice are rodents, and we want to know humans.
It's not only not professional, it's dishonest. No honest reviewer would take this study as evidence that tabacco isn't a cancerogene for humans.
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I think that it's overly demostrated that secondhand smoking, the primary issue in all this topic, has never show any scientific evidence that puts it as a significant risk factor for cancer.
In the contrary, it's an established scientific fact that secondhand smoking causes cancer and many other health problems, as shown above. Estimates go that it kills 60,000 people in the US per year. Further there is no serious doubt in health science that smoking is one of the most important health issues in the world.
