Posted on 11/13/2002 9:23:09 AM PST by SheLion
UK Sunday Telegraph...
Passive Smoking Doesn't Cause Cancer - Official
Headline: Passive Smoking Doesn't Cause Cancer - Official
Byline: Victoria MacDonald, Health Correspondent
Dateline: March 8, 1998
The world's leading health organization has withheld from publication a study which shows that not only might there be no link between passive smoking and lung cancer but that it could even have a protective effect. The astounding results are set to throw wide open the debate on passive smoking health risks.
The World Health Organization, which commissioned the 12-centre, seven-country European study has failed to make the findings public, and has instead produced only a summary of the results in an internal report. Despite repeated approaches, nobody at the WHO headquarters in Geneva would comment on the findings last week.
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The findings are certain to be an embarrassment to the WHO, which has spent years and vast sums on anti-smoking and anti-tobacco campaigns. The study is one of the largest ever to look at the link between passive smoking - inhaling other people's smoke - and lung cancer, and had been eagerly awaited by medical experts and campaigning groups. Yet the scientists have found that there was no statistical evidence that passive smoking caused lung cancer.
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The research compared 650 lung cancer patients with 1,542 healthy people. It looked at people who were married to smokers, worked with smokers, both worked and were married to smokers, and those who grew up with smokers. The results are consistent with there being no additional risk for a person living or working with a smoker and could be consistent with passive smoke having a protective effect against lung cancer.
The summary, seen by The Sunday Telegraph, also states: "There was no association between lung cancer risk and ETS exposure during childhood." A spokesman for Action on Smoking and Health said the findings "seem rather surprising given the evidence from other major reviews on the subject which have shown a clear association between passive smoking and a number of diseases."
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Dr Chris Proctor, head of science for BAT Industries, the tobacco group, said the findings had to be taken seriously. "If this study cannot find any statistically valid risk you have to ask if there can be any risk at all. "It confirms what we and many other scientists have long believed, that while smoking in public may be annoying to some non-smokers, the science does not show that being around a smoker is a lung-cancer risk."
My 46 year old sister-in-law who has emphysema from her fathers second hand smoke and who needs a lung transplant soon or she will die. It sort of makes me a bit annoyed with those who are too selfish for a minor inconvience when it comes to their children.
I wish I had read all of the way to this before I sent the earlier comment; I actually thought you were being mostly truthful, now I see that you are merely a boastful child.
Thank you, Old Professer. You are exactly correct in this!
In fact, a lot of smoking adults have little interest in any child's interests.
That is painfully obvious.
They have every right to boycott that restaurant until he stops using bleach or goes out of business!
Do you want to borrow a match to check the pilot li.....
I'm tempted to dismiss you with the cavalier, "So what's your point?". However, I feel compelled to first point out that you assume (without basis and therefore without reason or forethought) that I smoke.
This invalid assumption prompts me to assume that you have exhausted your feeble attempt at argument.
Please gather the children and exit stage far left.
There's a LOT of times I don't want to smoke. Even at night, when I get up to go to the powder room, I turn on the Weather Channel, have a glass a milk and go back to bed. Never light up! Now, if I was "so addicted," as THEY would love to think we are, I would be puffing from bedroom to powder room and BACK! LOL!
Lots of times, riding into town, I never light up. These anti's are all warped, IMHO!
Sounds like the time I visited my aunt and almost broke a tooth on a wax apple in the fruit bowl.
You know, the only ones still missing from this thread are the usual bowling balls screaming hysterically about how stupid smokers are?
Guess that list of writers, artists, physicists, and rocket scientists who smoked that we keep posting finally made them crawl into the corner and suck their thumbs?
Why don't YOU give it a break, as well! We never ever eat in a smoke free restaurant. NEVER will they get our money. So, your safe THERE!
And let's leave it up to the restaurant owner if he wants smoking sections or not. How about that?
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