Scare tactics and the smoking ban
As a review of the smoking ban is due soon and the mounting resentment of one million smokers in Ireland is beginning to be felt, it is important to look at the facts.
No one denies that smoking is bad for you, but there would seem to be some confusion as to whether āEnvironmental Tobacco Smokeā (ETS) is also a health risk. Currently there are treatments for the various cancers, but not a cure.
This is due in part to the fact that medical science has not yet discovered what causes a cancerous tumour to grow in the first place. However, there is evidence of a correlation between smoking and lung cancer. But correlation does not prove causation. As an analogy, when growing tomatoes one might use a fertiliser. It can easily be shown that the use of fertiliser will increase the tomato yields.
But fertiliser does not cause tomatoes, it merely promotes the process of growth. Smoking may promote the growth of lung cancer, but from this we cannot conclude that smoking causes the tumours.
We can only draw conclusions about causation if we investigate the mechanisms that lie behind the link between smoking and lung cancer.
In their meta-analysis, the epidemiologists who support our smoking ban do not investigate these links at all. Instead, they use statistics to fabricate a health scare.
John Brignell recently wrote a book called The Epidemiologists in which he calls their assertions on ETS āthe greatest scientific fraud everā.
The reason these smoking bans are being promoted arise from an epidemiological study by the US Environmental Protection Agency, which published a meta-study bringing together many other studies on passive smoking.
Unfortunately, the results were negative. It appeared from their findings that passive smoking was not a health risk at all. Mere facts could not be allowed to get in the way of a good health scare, so some imagination was applied to the problem. One negative study was removed - but the meta-study still produced no statistically significant result. But because they had set out in the first place to prove that ETS was harmful, they could not accept their own findings. So the goalposts were not so much moved as widened.
The organisation found there was a greater than 5% chance that the results were coincidental, but less than 10% - so they accepted them anyway.
In other words, the EPA accepted a bigger risk that the effect they found was purely due to chance, quite at odds with standard accepted practice.
Based on this flawed research, the National Toxicology Programme decided to list ETS as a class A carcinogen. This, in turn, allowed our health minister to frighten us with a fabricated health scare that deflected attention from the real problems of our health service.
We have been bombarded with propaganda that āETS causes cancerā. In reality, scientists have not watched ETS enter the lungs of any non-smoker and cause lung cancer anywhere in the world. In fact, such a study has not even been done on smokers.
Instead, convenient conclusions have been made around carefully manipulated statistical evidence to arrive at a default conclusion that ETS causes harm.
If ETS is a killer, could the minister or his department supply the Irish Examiner with the names of only three people in Ireland whose death cert lists ETS as the cause of death - I doubt it.
The overwhelming cause of death in the developed world is old age - a factor that, incredibly, is frequently ignored by epidemiological researchers. Someone in their 80s is 1,000 times more likely to develop cancer than someone in their 30s, whether they smoke or not. Even more incredibly, a smoker who dies in his or her 90s is added to the statistics as an example of premature death.
Yet in the absence of any āconclusiveā scientific evidence on ETS, Mr Martin has bowed to small pressure groups with vested interests who, not satisfied with sensible smoking restrictions, have hijacked our public health policy to their own ends.
John Mallon
5 Shamrock Grove
Mayfield
Cork
