Of the purported 400,000 "premature" deaths from smoking each year - 70,000 are over the age of 85, over 200,000 are between the ages of 75 and 85, and another 115,000 are between 65 and 75.
The SAMMEC computer program which CDC uses to estimate the number of smoking-attributed deaths is dependent on input from the anti-smoking operators of the system and naturally the figures will be frightening. They're intended to be. That doesn't make them accurate--and until actual deaths of actual people by actual caregivers are counted, allowing for the confounding factors that are also to blame for those deaths, the cannot be more than "guesstimates." Most smokers do NOT die young, as many believe, and "premature death" is a guess at best. Far fewer "young" people die from smoking than from automobile accidents or underage drinking.
80% OF SMOKERS WANT TO QUIT AND CAN'T -- FALSE
The Gallup poll (of 292 smokers, when a minimum of 1000 subjects are normally required for the proper extrapolation of data) which reported this figure also states that 77% of smokers feel they can quit when they're ready. The second part of this myth is that smokers are addicts who cannot give up their drug of choice, that Big Tobacco has somehow caused one-quarter of the citizenry to lose its self-determination. This debate has nothing to do with Big Tobacco and nothing to do with the alleged "addiction" suffered by smokers--it has to do ONLY with one segment of the population who believe their opinion has absolute intellectual authority over others. Smokers in the year 2001 know the risks inherent in smoking and choose to smoke anyway. They CHOOSE. From the first wave of anti-smokerism until now, half the smokers in the population quit: Those are the ones who wanted to quit. The fifty-one million smokers who continue to smoke do not want to quit and if they do, they will.
I routinely go for two to four days twice a year without tobacco of any kind. Normally when floating or canoeing.
Stanton Glantz, notorious anti-smoker, performed a meta-analysis which was published in the journal Circulation in 1991, and republished in JAMA in 1995. (Of the 12 studies on fatal myocardial events used by Glantz in this review, 8 showed NO statistically significant risk for ets exposure in non-smokers; of the 11 studies covering non-fatal myocardial events, 10 failed to show a significant link.) Relying heavily on questionable research about a tiny increase in arterial deposits, Glantz came to the conclusion that if a non-smoker exposed to secondary smoke had 20% increase in arterial deposits, then 20% of the 1,000,000 heart disease deaths each year must be attributed to secondary smoke. Disregarding the concept of "threshold," he wrote a massive paper on it and his conclusions have been used since to claim more than 50,000 deaths due to secondary smoke each year.
Realizing the flimsy basis for such a claim, no agency of the U.S. government--including the EPA and the CDC--has officially endorsed Glantz's misrepresentation of the facts. However, even with this most blatant misuse of science, the American Heart Association still uses Glantz's biased figure of 50,000 deaths a year as does the anti-smoker cartel of NGOs, pharmaceutical companies, once-respected charities, and paid professional anti-smoking activists.
In 1995 the Congressional Research Service (a 741 person, $62 million per year think tank that works exclusively for Congress) rejects EPA and 3 other studies as not statistically significant and tainted by poor research and analysis. After 20 months and several million dollars, the CRS stated: "It is very possible that no deaths have been caused by environmental tobacco smoke." It found no basis for a proposed OSHA smoking ban in federal workplaces.
In 1998, the World Health Organization study on environmental tobacco smoke, purportedly the largest such ever undertaken, comprising 20 years in 38 centers in 21 countries was denounced by anti-smoking activists because it minimized the allegedly detrimental effects of environmental tobacco smoke. It actually showed no statistically significant increase (1.16)(it doesn't START to be significant until it reaches 2.00 and epidemiologists prefer 3.00) in lung cancer in non-smokers who had lived and worked with smokers for 40-50 years. WHO didn't release the study at all until it was leaked to a newspaper, and when they did release the study, it was accompanied by a press release whose headline screamed: "Passive Smoke Does Cause Cancer, Do Not Let Them Fool You," which was published verbatim by the popular press here and abroad. Apparently not one of the journalists took the trouble to read the actual study.
You might also take a look here. From the Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Exposures to second-hand smoke lower than believed, ORNL study finds
That's all for tonight. I have to get some sleep to be ready for work tomorrow.