‘The abuse of science to assert certainty on contentious issues, and to shut down important discussions, is an increasing problem in public debate.
Peter Hitchens
‘ Trawling through some US newspapers, I found this interesting reflection in an article in the Chicago Sun Times (22nd October 2005), by Dennis Constant( Director of the Illinois Taxpayer Education Foundation): ‘According to Michael Fumento, writing in Health Care News, in 2003 professors James Enstrom of UCLA and Geoffrey Kabat of the State University of New York reported in the British Medical Journal that their 39-year study of 35,561 Californians who had never smoked showed no causal relationship between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco-related mortality..
‘Fumento also reports that in 1999, an Environmental Health Perspectives survey of 17 studies of environmental tobacco smoke and heart disease found only five that were statistically significantly positive. And in 2002, an analysis of 48 studies of environmental tobacco smoke found only 10 studies that were significantly positive, one that was significantly negative, and 37 that were not significant in either direction.
‘Fumento adds that in 1975, when many more individuals smoked in restaurants, cocktail lounges and transportation lounges, the concentration of tobacco smoke then was equivalent to 0.004 cigarettes an hour — a very small amount.
‘Despite the claim of anti-smoking groups that scientific studies unanimously have shown that second-hand smoke is killing thousands from lung cancer, the truth is that the vast majority of such studies failed to find any statistically significant link.’
and:
‘Passive smoking: is there convincing evidence that it’s harmful?
Profound scepticism about the claim that secondary smoking kills is the only rationally tenable position. Look beyond the lazy political and media consensus that simply assumes that because smoking kills secondary smoking must as well, and the evidence is overwhelming.
When I interviewed her in 2004, Amanda Sandford of Ash acknowledged unintentionally that much secondary smoking science is unscientific. She said: “A lot of the studies that have been done on passive smoking produce results that are not statistically significant according to conventional analysis.” In plain English, that means that if secondary smoking were not already the focus of a torrent of moral sanctimony, few reputable scientists would dare to assert that it causes lung cancer, heart disease or any of the other life-threatening conditions with which it is routinely associated.
Dr Ken Denson, a medical professional who is prepared say what others only think, puts it more bluntly: “The ill effects of passive smoking are still intuition rather than scientific fact… All in all, the medical evidence for any deleterious effect of passive smoking is extremely tenuous and it is unlikely that it would ever stand up in a court of law.”
A recent report by the International Agency for Research on Cancer reveals that, “In total, 23 studies have been published on [workplace] exposure to secondhand smoke. Only one reported a statistically significant association between exposure to secondhand smoke at the workplace and risk for lung cancer.” One out of 23 is usually dismissed as a rogue result..’ source
