Here is an old story from 2003;
You won't be killed by the person smoking next to you. But would you believe that? By Robert Matthews.


It was a rare good news story in an otherwise grim week. A landmark study into the effects of inhaling other people's smoke revealed that fears that passive smoking kills are unfounded.

After studying the health of tens of thousands of people married to smokers, US researchers found they face no significant extra risk of lung cancer or heart disease. It may sting your eyes, take your breath away and make your clothes smell, but other people's cigarette smoke will not kill you.

The demise of a supposed major risk to public health might be expected to prompt medical experts and campaigners to celebrate. Instead, they scrambled to condemn the study, its authors, its conclusions, and the journal that published them.

All this came as no surprise to those who have tried to uncover the facts about passive smoking. More than any other health debate, the question of whether smokers kill others as well as themselves is engulfed in a smog of political correctness and dubious science.

Researchers who dissent from the party line face character assassination and the termination of grants. Those who report their findings are vilified as lackeys of the tobacco industry, and accused of professional misconduct.

The furore over last week's negative findings, reported in the respected British Medical Journal, has its origins in research published in the same journal in October 1997. After reviewing the evidence from dozens of studies, researchers at the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, London, concluded that being married to a smoker increases the "risk" of lung cancer and heart disease by around 25 per cent.

The results were seized on by health campaigners as final proof of what they had known all along: that smokers are not just killing themselves - they are also killing innocent bystanders, and must be stopped.

But in March 1998, London's Sunday Telegraph revealed that an international study by the World Health Organisation had failed to find any convincing evidence of a link between passive smoking and cancer. The article prompted uproar among anti-smoking campaigners and denials from WHO, which insisted the study had found a 16 per cent increase in cancer "risk" among those married to smokers.

WHO, in what has become a standard ruse in the passive-smoking debate, ignored the fact that the 16 per cent risk figure was not "statistically significant". That is, it had failed to meet the standard of proof usually demanded by scientists.

But passive smoking research is an area where the usual standards do not apply. If they did, last week's wholly negative findings would have surprised no one. For long before the publication of the original BMJ studies, it had been clear that the 25 per cent extra risk figure was likely to prove a wild exaggeration.

The evidence comes from research into a key issue in the passive smoking debate: just how much smoke do non-smokers actually inhale? Surprisingly few attempts have been made to gauge smoke exposure directly. Those that have raise grave doubts over claims that passive smoking poses a significant health risk.

In studies across Europe over the past decade, air quality experts at Covance Laboratories in England gave air monitors to thousands of people and measured their exposure to smoke. The startling results showed passive smokers are exposed to the equivalent of six cigarettes a year, an extra lung cancer risk of 2 per cent compared with non-smokers. The figure is 10 times lower than the BMJ studies claimed.

So small a risk is, however, in line with last week's negative findings. It also explains an awkward fact rarely mentioned by anti-smoking campaigners: more than 80 per cent of all studies of passive smoking have failed to find a statistically significant link to lung cancer. Only by subjecting them to abstruse statistical techniques can they deliver the goods.

One technique is anything but abstruse, however. It involves simply ignoring results that do not fit. In the original BMJ reports, a major US study showing no extra heart disease risk from passive smoking was excluded on the grounds that it did not fit with the positive results, and had been funded by the tobacco industry. The air monitoring studies have been ignored for the same reasons.

Scientists are understandably chary of research backed by an industry with a history of deceit. Yet such is the conviction that passive smoking is a proven killer that researchers who think otherwise have little choice but to apply for tobacco industry support. Professor James Enstrom, of the University of California, the lead author of the study whose negative findings sparked last week's controversy, said it would never have seen the light of day without support from the tobacco industry.

Enstrom, compelled to take tobacco industry money to complete the study, then found that journals were unwilling to publish his negative findings. Since the BMJ published it, he has been subjected to a barrage of criticism: "The whole process has been aggressive, vitriolic hate," he says.

Dr Richard Smith, the journal's editor, said the decision to publish the findings was made only after they had been thoroughly refereed, and full disclosure made of the source of funding.
"continued below"

I'd be putting my money on this guy being right.
It never made sense to me that inhaling 100ths of the amount of smoke as somedody right next to you smoking would be all that dangerous.

Oh but second hand smoke is so much more harmful!...yeah right.

our son’s cough may have its origins in allergy and may be a symptom of asthma. . . .

Air pollution and cigarette smoking has been associated with increased levels of chronic lung disease. These may also aggravate an underlying lung disease, especially cigarette smoke. Smoking parents, especially those whose children have chronic lung disease, should be advised that they are exposing their children’s lungs to significant amounts of “second hand” cigarette smoke in the home. They should be urged to stop smoking around their children, if not altogether. . . .

Your son should be examined by a paediatrician to ascertain whether or not he is suffering from asthma and also rule out other causes of his cough. It would be a good idea to take the father along because treating the child without addressing the source of the problem (environmental smoke) is only doing half the work. If the father understands that his smoking could be contributing to his son’s sickness, he will more cooperative towards getting involved in the treatment. i
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It is an interesting point being made in the original article, which I expected the AGW denialists to jump on, because of the fact that it is saying that scientists are manipulating data because of political correctness, to deliberately overstate, and misinform people as to what the dangers of passive smoking are.

I told my wife about it, and she just said they must be mad, it is just common sense, if smoking is bad for you, then passive smoking is too, which is hard to argue against, but how bad is the question, and that there is so little effort "allowed" to try and quantify just what effects passive smoking may have upon people is a reasonable thing to ponder.

I found the figure of a spouse of a smoker being likely to ingest six cigarettes worth of smoke a year as quite amazing, from all the public campaigns about it's dangers, I would have expected a figure far greater to be the case, by a factor of at least 10 to 100 fold.

I just hate it, dangerous or not
and I am glad that there are places I don't have to enjoy this non-dangerous nuisance.

Same as noise, won't kill me but annoys the hell out of me.

Sappho wrote on Jan 13^th, 2010 at 1:57pm:


Well, industries have some very stringent environmental limits. It's all a question of exposure.

The average city street, particularly with diesel exhaust gases can be  pretty bad sometimes. Even worse are perfumes that women wear (and probably some men). They contain a wide range of chemicals that have not been evaluated for toxicity through inhalation. They are probably dangerous to your health (as well as your wealth).

The use of acetone based nail polish remover in a car or enclosed space is another bad one.

A lot of it comes down to voluntary or compulsory risk. People tend to accept voluntary risk, such as smoking or drug taking,  but will not tolerate a much lower risk if they have no choice in the matter and it's imposed on them.

It has as much to do with psychology as actual dose sometimes.

I'll step away from cigarette smoke.
Any smoke is carcinogenic, people producing charcoal used to have high incidence of lung cancer, same with folk employed at meat and fish smoking facilities.

Even if it is as healthy as pure air I tent to shy away from such a free to air pleasure!

mozzaok wrote on Jan 6^th, 2010 at 9:21pm:


good work keep it up!