Ooooooh! I second that one! 
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."
No, the methodology was not "screwed" and far from conflicting "with all others," it bolstered their findings. It was a well-designed, very large study whose conclusions did not match the preconceived goal.
I don't see any reason to believe that this study is the truth and all others are fatally flawed. You should expect some studies to fail to find correlations that exist. They are designed to make such errors unlikely, but not impossible.
This is actually funny. You make a good point, not realizing that the vast majority of all studies ever done on ets found that the risk is statistically insignificant. Very few showed a significant risk, and only one was far enough above unity to be of any value. Of the 30 or so studies meta-analyzed by the EPA for their "report," 24 of them showed no risk. And even after putting all those into the mixmaster trying to come up with SOMETHING they could screech about, they were forced to drop the confidence interval from the standard 95% to 90%.
Do you guys just enjoy being manipulated and lied to? Big Anti-Tobacco is at least as bad as Big Tobacco ever was, but you're too blind to see it.
Better than you do, apparently. Why is it, minnie, that the millions of dollars spent desperately trying to prove that shs causes harm hasn't been able to do it? And still you say ""I'm right, and I know I'm right because they wouldn't keep proving I was wrong if I wasn't right."
Those are obviously BAD doctors out for your money, not for your health.
Doctors are, as a group, as likely to be anti-smokers as anyone else. They also, as a group, believe what they read or are told by others in their field, and seldom have the time to do the research themselves. Neither is there a consensus in the medical community about the dangers of shs, regardless what you may have heard, and only 67% of doctors ever mention smoking to their patients.
Dr. Fernando Martinez, researcher and co-author of the EPA's Chapter 8 (the chapter dealing with kids, asthma and other respiratory diseases) and director of respiratory sciences at the University of Arizona said recently: "Like most people, I assumed tobacco smoke and pollution were the problem -- this was the politically correct way to think. But these factors turned out not to play a major role." And from the Lung Association of Canada: "Asthma is not caused by smoking. The reason asthma develops in one person and not another is not well known. Asthma tends to run in families, but not always."
It's a far greater risk for children to live in the inner cities, to have carpeting on the floor, to be poor--(why don't those selfish, abusive parents refrain from having kids in the first place?) My point is that blaming smoking for everything wrong with children or adults is not addressing the real problems so the real problems just get worse.
My siblings and I grew up in a smoking home and never had any health issues at all. We were all strapping, healthy, happy kids who were required to do our share of work and who played just as hard; my children grew up in a smoking home with no health problems; and my grandchildren are growing up in a smoking home. They are healthy, happy and active. If they weren't, I wouldn't smoke around them and I'm sure their parents wouldn't either.
We put risks in perspective as people used to do and I believe we'd all be better off if it was still done that way. We have a swimming pool. Instead of having it ripped out because it's a risk, we put up a fence (although all summer it stays open because the kids swim like fish). We have horses. Instead of our being scared to death of one of them falling off, they wear helmets (didn't help Christopher Reeve, but...). We have off-road Quadrunners and MotoCross bikes. It doesn't make them risk-free, but the whole family attended safety classes. We ski on occasion, ditto the safety classes. We smoke in our home. We open windows, have a few Smoke-Eaters around with Hepa filters, and visitors are generally surprised to discover we smoke.
This should never have become such a divisive issue, and it wouldn't have except for the massive amounts of money and power involved. There's a solution to every problem that doesn't trample on either side's rights, but anti-smokers aren't willing to discuss those solutions. That's one of the differences between an anti-smoker and a nonsmoker.
Launch? No, the "conspiracy" was launched a long time ago...about the same time the multinational pharmaceutical companies climbed in bed with the antis in a global plan to capture the nicotine market. Actually, it started long before that, but the multi-billion-dollar contract between WHO and the Big 3 drug companies that manufacture "smoking cessation" devices and products has fueled it to its current height.
There's money on both sides.
So-called Big Tobacco's war chest is dwarfed by that on the other side which includes the Charity Cartel, the pharmaceuticals, and Big Government.
The posters here have, for the most part, been debating health as well as rights.
I'm well aware of what the posters here debate. Both issues are made more complex than they need to be by the inside workings of the behemoths on all sides. Simply put healthwise, direct smoking is a risk and about 1/3 of lifetime smokers will suffer a "smoking-related" illness, about half of them will succumb to those illnesses past the age of 75; nearly 20% after age 85. Many nonsmokers suffer those same illnesses or variations thereof. Many other factors determine whether or not that will happen, including genetics. Human beings do a lot of things that may not be "good for" them, but they have the absolute right--or SHOULD have--to do so. A group of healthists led by C. Everett Koop said, in essence, we see no value in smoking and it's hurting a lot of people, and everyone knows how corrupt the tobacco industry is, so we'll tell people smoking is bad for them and they'll stop.
Problem was that people didn't stop. Well, about half of them did, the rest the antis call "hardcore" smokers and they/we require "special measures." That realization sent the anti-smoker cabal back to the drawing board and they determined the only way to force these recalcitrant scofflaws who continued to smoke into quitting was to make others think the smoke hurt them. The State of Minnesota in their 1984 Plan for Nonsmoking: "Any means necessary must be used to de-socialize smokers,smoking must be equated with drugs sex and violence, the smoker must be isolated from the rest of society... high taxation on tobacco products will make the price unacceptable."
There are 32.000+ anti-smoker groups sucking at the public teat and they are all very well fed. To call the current systematic destruction of liberties in the guise of public health a "conspiracy" is true but not necessarily accurate. And I'm too tired tonight to explain the difference.
If there are "doctors" here, and they're honest, they'll point to studies and avoid the conspiracy theories.
They are not mutually exclusive. If you actually studied the "studies" and were honest about it, you'd be hard pressed to call it anything BUT a conspiracy.
Fortunately, nicotine cannot pass through the FR spam screen.
Ooooooh! I second that one!
You have every right to set your rules in your own home! A person¡¦s home is their castle, and I have all respect for you and anyone who enforces inside their homes what they want or do not want. That's a given. :)
Don't get me wrong - I think the lawsuits were a bunch of croc. I think all the anti-smoking laws are a bunch of bull. if you or my son or anyone chooses to indulge, that is your prerogative and no one should tell you if you can or cannot smoke.
The lawsuits and the war on the smokers is all about MONEY! Tobacco is legal, and since Big Tobacco fell on their knees back in 1998 in front of the Attorney Generals, I have lost all respect for them. Big T sold us out.
I personally choose not to, and I choose to dine etc in a smoke-free environment. But I also know that if I choos4e to go to a bar or a casino, etc - then I am making the conscious decision to enter a smokefilled area.
Preferring to dine in a smoke free environment is your right. I think there are enough non-smoking restaurants to do to accommodate non-smokers. It¡¦s the government intrusion that we are fighting. Leave the decision up to the owner and his patrons to allow smoking or not. We do not need more government BIG BROTHER moving in to tell us all how to live.
Don't confuse my belief that cigarette smoke caused my cancer as a statement that I support any and all anti-smoking crap. All I was saying is that i know what happened to me, no matter what this study says - heck maybe I am that "Statistically insignificant" person - LOL!
It¡¦s just very confusing to me that how anyone can dispute our governments DOE report. Thats like saying they are lying to us. And since there are so many anti-health groups formed now wanting to make it very hard on the smokers, and the DOE came out saying that ETS is not the killer the health groups want to make it, I ask: I think any anti who tries to dismiss the findings of the U.S. Department of Energy labs at Oak Ridge, should be confronted with the question: "Are you saying that DOE researchers committed scientific fraud and that their findings on ETS exposure are untrue?"
I'd like to see what any anti would say in response to that question.
There needs to be space for all of us. Especially when smokers go out to dinner and pay for it. Most of us now refuse to spend our money in an establishment that will not accommodate us. They say smoking bans aren't hurting businesses. But they are SO wrong. There just needs to be a "happy ground" for us all, without Big Brother stepping in.
Now, Max..............heh! (You know me pretty well!)
Your wrong. Restaurant and bar owners have the right to let who they want come through their doors and who they do not. You have seen signs on their doors: no shirt, no entry. No shoes, no entry. No dogs allowed. They can also add to their signs "Smoking Establishment" to which one of our places up here has right out front on their window.
I just can't understand for the life of me, why the anti-smokers have to have it all their way! Why in the world are people, such as yourself, fighting to ban one group of people just because we smoke? Yet you will sit next to a beer guzzler all night, watch him walk out the door and drive. I don't see any campaign against THAT!
Smokers have no desire to be around people who do not want to be around us. We want the establishments to decide if they want smoking, not Big Brother, and take it from there.
Smokers aren't going away. I can assure you.
I could not agree more. I have no problem with there being smoking and non-smoking areas in restaurants etc. That way we both have an area we can enjoy.
I agree wholeheartedly that the total Non-smoking establishments shoould be shunned by smokers. As you said is it all about Money, and it is money that they will understand.
Neither does inhaling the air and stench of someone's fart, but it doesn't mean other people have the right to polute my air whether the noxious gas is coming out of their mouths or somewhere else.
So now people with have to use that argument instead of the health argument.
As a past coordinater of a local Tough Love group, I have never before been accused of catering a bit too much to children.
I do however believe parents have responsibilites and forcing a child to breath your smoke because is not one of those responsibilites.
Unfortunately, it means "nothing". There is no "statistical" evidence either way. It doesn't mean there isn't a causal relationship, it just means the science of statistics are unable to prove one.
Isn't it strange that any study the ANTI smoking groups brings out, are bought hook line and sinker, yet when a study goes the other way, it's........ studies lie.
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