Passive Smoking Doesn't Cause Cancer?

Question

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 organisation 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 Organisation, 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.

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.

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."

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."

Answer 1

When have facts ever stopped people from cramming their idealogy down our throats? I smoke, and I avoid crowded areas to give people that don't smoke enough range as to not be around me. I know a lot of people hate the smell of cigarettes. I'm cool with that. And many public places, no problem if I can't smoke. I am in the minority now so I go with the flow of the majority.

However, do gooders have passed laws where I live we can't even smoke in bars anymore. I'm not talking restaurants, I mean straight up bars. At what point do the rights of people that own building supercede the rights of people who can choose to or to not frequent the establishment? Absolutely insane.

Answer 2

I see two possibilities for the discrepency.
The first is that the U.S. reports are being manipulated (and I firmly believe that they ARE.) By convincing the American people that second-hand smoke is "deadly", the U.S. government is able to reach ever deeper ino the smokers' pockets in the amount of higher taxes on cigarettes. After all, who's going to come to the defense of those "dirty smokers" when the state or U.S. goverment needs a cash infusion? At this time, a national healthcare system for children being devised is designated to be funded solely by increased taxes on tobacco products.
Here's the catch. If tobacco has been found to be SO deady, why is it still legal? (Could it be that the goverment would go bankrupt without tobacco tax dollars?)
A second option is the tobacco itself. My son-in-law's father is an Englishman who claims that the rate of lung cancer in Europe is far lower than in the U.S., due to the fact that European cigarettes are made from Turkish tobacco and the use of pesticides on it is strictly limited. If this is true, why aren't U.S. tobacco farmers held to the same standard?

Answer 3

That is what scientists that global warming deniers depend on, claims to. They even claimed there was no scientific evidence to support that smoking caused lung cancer until the cig companies reports found their way into public hands.

Here is the deal with that.
Increased particulate mattter from everything from exhaust to smoking has been proven to cause health problems. This is fact. BUT the increase in incidence between second hand smokers and those who don't smoke, getting lung cancer is so small that it really isn't something that science can say beyond a shadow of doubt, proves that it does.
Now if you change the debate to causing health problems rather than cancer, it causes a whole slew of health problems from increased allergy reactions, to increased chances of other lung related health problems that isn't cancer.
So if you throw all the health related effects together, there is a significant increase in health related problems among second hand smokers, as compared to people who don't live with someone who smokes.

Answer 4

The Government needs to back off. I don't smoke but I don't like all these Nazi inspired anti-smoking laws. If I don't want to go to a place where people smoke then I don't go. There are plenty of places to go that do not allow smoking . I don't need some pointy headed politician telling me that inhaling a bunch of smoke is bad for me. I figured that one out a long time ago.

Answer 5

I never understood that stupid commercial that claimed second hand smoke was 5 times more deadly than first hand smoke.

I just wondered, how could that be? The smokers inhale it directly, and then they get the same second hand smoke everyone else gets.

This study confirms the obvious.

Answer 6

Whether it dose or doesn't isn't the question. The question is "Does the government have the right to tell private business owners that they can't let their customers smoke in their buildings?" Of course the answer is no. We are responsible for our own welfare and should not be depending on Big Brother to look out for us.

Answer 7

1998? it would have been better if you used a report from 2007.

Answer 8

go ************