Wednesday 28 January 2009

TICAP Wednesday 28th January

09:40 Conference is reconvened with a quick rundown of yesterday's events.

For those in the UK, Nick Hogan has drawn attention to a new web-site, backed by UKIP, to save our pubs. You can view it here.

09:45 Dr John Luik (pictured below) begins the discussion on how to tackle the prohibition epidemic. He argues that prohibitionists are increasingly following a state-led programme of health promotion which fears differing lifestyles which "differ from the state view of a good life"

Dr Luik: "The prohibitionist does not essentially believe human beings can make rational choices. They don't want debate on these choices."



Dr Luik explains how prohibitionists use skewed statistics to 'prove' their point, and then avoid debate at all costs. If forced into debate, one should ride out the initial irrational insults, and push for discussion of facts. With smoking, alcohol and obesity, the prohibitionist will always attempt to avoid bare facts by attempting to discredit the questioner as being "paid".

How appropriate ... see comments from yesterday.

Dr Luik points out that prohibitionists have a long record of failure, which leads to even more prohibitionist measures to reduce consumption of 'unhealthy' products. He states that the best way to defeat a prohibitionist is to know the science better than them, and to stick to the facts and true statistics which consistently show their policies not to be successful.

10:20 Nigel Farage MEP (UKIP) enthusiastically begins his speech. He starts by slmming the EU for their decision to cancel the previous TICAP venue. He states that he will "raise merry hell" about it and will be pursuing compensation.


On prohibition,

Nigel Farage: "It's about time we stood up and said: 'Enough is enough'."


Farage asks if it is not the healthy way to live to be born a free man or woman, without being restricted in lifestyle choices by Government. He states that now, alcohol is the prohibitionists next target, he mentions the UK's proposed legislation to criminalise giving alcohol to anyone under 15 years of age ... to gasps from the French contingent.

Farage picks out the British Beer and Pub Association for attack, saying that, in conversation with one of their member recently, the BBPA representative stated "the smoking ban is not an issue anymore" despite UK pubs closing at the rate of 6 per day.

Nigel Farage: "I'm going to fight for separate smoking rooms. It is a realistic target to aim for."


Mr Farage ends by highlighting strict prohibitions in the past, such as that under Cromwell. He stated that all such prohibition comes to an end and looks forward to the time when this will happen again and common sense returns.

10:45 Gian Turci rises to present "The Brussel Declaration". He calls for the interests of proper science to be protected, and for the rejection of science as a result of corruption, marketing spin and ideological promotion.

10:55 Coffee Break followed by questions from the floor.

11:15 Conference reconvenes.

A UK attendee asks Dr Luik if it is falling educational standards that has led to poor debate and science reporting. He says that it is not necessarily educational standards, but poor reporting of science by journalists and government. Nigel Farage steps in and adds that he feels, in the UK, that the BBC charging a licence fee is wrong if they are to be taking sides in healthist debate.

Frederique DuPont asks about the increasing prohibitionist tendency to 'brainwash' children regards 'correct' lifestyles. Dr Luik answers that he has no problem with this, as it doesn't work. He asserts that no matter the emphasis from the health lobby, "you can't stop the young from experimenting". The factor of wealth is more relevant. The richer people are, the less likely they are to take risks. Dr Luik sated that a better approach would be to encourage ambition and entrepreneurial spirit.

Dr Luik: "The warning that would best deter young people from smoking would be 'Warning. Your parents think smoking is cool'."


In response to a question about marginalisation of smokers, Dr Luik states that making a section of society social outcasts is the least attractive aspect of the prohibitionists to the general public, and should be a central plank of the fight against them.

11:50 A German attendee questions Nigel Farage and disagrees with the separation of smokers and non-smokers. Farage replies saying that although he understands the sentiment, he feels a compromise is more realistic, restores choice, and gives government a way of relaxing legislation without losing face.

On a question about encroachment on civil liberties in general and who to vote for in countries other than the UK, Mr Farage answers that he feels there are many parties through Europe that have an agenda geared towards this, and he is hopeful that the EU group of which UKIP are a member, will have a greater representation after the 2009 elections.

The session ends with an assertion from Nigel Farage that he is firmly behind TICAP and will do his best to resist prohibitionists in the EU.

Delegates have been invited to tour the EU building by UKIP, so we will get to go inside after all ... hopefully.

Eamon Mallon is bringing the conference to a close with a live rendition of his song "Jackboot".


12:20 The inaugural TICAP Conference ends

172 comments:

  1. Thank you Dick! Waiting and watching from Philadelphia here at 4am! Luik is GREAT! He came to our conference in Vegas three years ago and wowwed everyone. He's dedicated and he knows his stuff!

    He also knows what it's like to be attacked by his former colleagues: I believe he has that in common with Drs. Gori and Siegel as well as other who've chosen the more honest path.

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  2. Thanks for the updates Dick - It sounds lokie it's going great

    Hullspur

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  3. Then again... Luik gets paid... Gori gets paid ...

    people getting paid by the industry are telling the industry isn't harmful

    there seems to be a certain lack of credibility

    why didn't ticap chosse speakers without such obvious bonds to the industry ?

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  4. To the Anonymous 09:25 poster: try to imagine an antismoking conference where none of the speakers got paid by either Big Pharma or antismoking-dedicated organizations, and one where the participants paid for their own transportation and accommodations and you'd have an antismoking conference with no speakers and no audience.

    Instead what you get are $10,000,000 dollar extravaganzas with thousands of well-paid attendees.

    The difference is night and day. And remember that both Luik and Gori have received FAR more money from "Tobacco Control" than anyone could ever argue they've received through their work for free-choice.

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  5. "there seems to be a certain lack of credibility"-Anon.

    As opposed to the unbiased saints your team puts up to speak?

    You are either incredibly naive or stupid.

    It's time you grew up.

    Colin.

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  6. Michael,

    what a silly attempt to get away with a red herring.

    Do you know the amount of money Gori received from the industry ?
    (i posted some links in the previous topic)

    could you tell me what you think of what's written in those documents ?

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  7. Dick.
    Thanks again for this.
    Prohibition is doomed for failure and I'm pleased that this has been pointed out. I can't quite grasp why our government think otherwise.
    They can use as much spin, cherry-picking, playing on words, etc as they like, but a fact is a fact.
    Nigel's right as well. They were very underhand tactics that were used for its cancellation.
    Looking forward to hearing more as the day progresses.

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  8. "With smoking, alcohol and obesity, the prohibitionist will always attempt to avoid bare facts by attempting to discredit the questioner as being "paid".

    How appropriate ... see comments from yesterday."

    Hmmm, very much like the pro-smokers' criticism of SCOTH, in fact. They never attempt to comment on its actual reports. All they say is that SCOTH's conclusions are invalid because its members are in the pay of Big Pharma. By John Luik's own test, this is clearly an example of pro-smokers trying to "avoid bare facts".

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  9. Red Herrings from an Anonymous poster? One might ask what YOU are getting paid, although you might not have the courage of a Dr. Gori in admitting it. I didn't see your links, though I did see the charges made in the EU Reporter article.

    So Mr. Anonymous... who ARE you lining your pockets from behind your internet mask today?


    Michael J. McFadden
    Author of "Dissecting Antismokers' Brains"
    Philadelphia, PA USA

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  10. it's just nicer to see how people react when you demonstrate their gods are nothing but paid consultants.

    the respons on this blog seems to be :

    he's telling what i want to hear, so it doesn't matter the speakers are frauds.

    and at the same time they are telling 'x or y got paid by Z'

    the ease of having double standards.

    oh how easy it is not to think.

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  11. how much i get paid : nothing at all.

    i just happen to like honesty.

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  12. Honesty and anonymity... they go so well together don't they?

    I will tell you quite plainly: I have nothing against researchers getting paid for their work, whether it by by Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, or Big Antismoking. The key question is whether their research holds up to analysis and whether they are willing to defend their work when it is challenged.

    A quick visit to the BMJ's Rapid Response area for the "Great Helena Heart Miracle Study" at:

    http://www.bmj.com/cgi/eletters/bmj.38055.715683.55v1#125618

    and

    http://www.bmj.com/cgi/eletters/bmj.38055.715683.55v1#123038

    show how abysmally Antismoking researchers fare when challenged to defend their work: they simply try to erase the evidence of their lies.

    Michael J. McFadden
    Author of "Dissecting Antismokers' Brains"

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  13. At least Michael J McFadden will never post anonymously. After all, if he did, how would he be able to flog his book to gullible pro-smokers?

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  14. LOL! And who's the fishmonger with the Red Herrings now, eh Oh Anonymous One? :> Methinks your attempts to distract from the meat of the conference are backfiring a bit - as they always will.


    - MJM

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  15. What immature and pathetic jibes hidden behind anonymity. At least some (very few) anti-smokers have the guts to show themselves.
    Bias, unfounded personal attacks and incredible claims are rife in the tobacco control movement but that, of course, is acceptable to gutless wimps who know well "Oh, how easy it is not to think"

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  16. Mr. Farage's end note is quite accurate: Prohibitionism goes against basic human nature and as such it can never win out in the long run. America learned that lesson with alcohol almost a hundred years ago, and today's Prohibitionists have also learned.

    For the most part they don't go for "real" prohibition now: they simply seek to eliminate what they don't like by using the "Death From A Thousand Cuts" technique. That, combined with "Anonymous" mudslinging and occasionally "Dragging Out The Children" are effective techniques to achieve a near-prohibitionist world... in the short run.

    The long run is a different story however, and the TICAP conference is showing just how flimsy the foundations of Carrie Nation's new castle really are.

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  17. Anonymous @09.36

    Your feeble attempt to discredit speakers at the conference betrays your inability to accept that there could possibly be any real opposition. Do you get paid for what you do? Like the man said.... GROW UP.

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  18. Isn't it irrelevant who pays Dr Luik seeing as he is merely commenting on prohibitionist techniques? Comments here have proved his commentary to be completely correct.

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  19. A comment e-mailed from Bearwitch yesterday.

    Great job there with the updates. It's impressive the countries people have come from to put their points forward and attend this conference.

    I agree about the disturbing use of children in the latest campaign. I am not a parent but isn't that putting the children in some possible danger? Imagine the picture, normally passive drunken dad comes home from the pub, annoyed about standing out in the cold to have a cig. Kid tells dad not to light up and starts preaching about what they were told at school/saw in ads. Dad sees red and possibly lashes out at kid or shouts. I apologise if this is an offensive thought to anyone but isn't this a distinct possibility? Poor dad goes into major depression thinking about what he has done (totally out of character) and kid is very wary. And they say they are doing this to protect the children. Perhaps that is another viewpoint that should be investigated in the argument about the tools they are using for their filthy lies and brainwashing.

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  20. A fact is a fact, whether you like the fact or not.
    Slurs cannot hide a fact. Slurs may attempt to divert attention to it, but the fact still stands and always will.

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  21. Hello Dick & Michael

    I'm thoroughly enjoying the updates.

    Can I ask this question.

    Is it right and proper that legislation can be put on the statute book when only one side of the argument has been looked at.

    There are no autopsy reports that give 'passive smoking' as a primary cause of death, so how can our government say that it kills...is there no legal challenge to this?

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  22. "The prohibitionist does not essentially believe human beings can make rational choices."

    Thus they must believe that they are not human beings, because they are the only ones who can make rational choices ...

    I stand by the idea that human beings can and have to make rational choices for themselves. But no human being can make rational choices for other human beings.

    Ben Palmer

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  23. Chris, not that I know of. There are very strict legal rules for legal challenges and they're not always as clean and neat as us non-lawyers might think. For the most part we've lost in challenging smoking bans on legal grounds. One area where we've won a fair amount though is on limiting the coercive power of the state on forcing indentured servitude upon business owners. Owners are neither paid nor trained by the state to act as enforcers of the law. They can be required to inform the customer that smoking is not permitted in their establishment, but that is all they can generally be required to do.

    In terms of proving deaths from "Passivrauchen" (Hitler's preferred pronounciation for "passive smoking") eventually the Antismokers will alway be able to find occasional judges and juries they can sway to their views. They've got the money to hire lawyers by the busload and they're playing the same sort of legal game that Big Tobacco played in the 1960s/70s... but in reverse.

    - MJM

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  24. "Gian Turci...calls for the interests of proper science to be protected".

    I agree with that sentiment. I am sure that Michael Siegel and other members of the scientific community who recognise the dangers of passive smoking would also agree.

    But if that is really what Mr Turci is calling for, does that mean that he and the conference are prepared to challenge the attempts by Big Tobacco to corrupt the definition of sound epidemiological practice (e.g. the notion that the results of ANY epidemiological study should be disregarded unless it shows a Relative Risk of 2 or 3 or more)?.

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  25. Smoking bans have allowed new Nazi ideology to flourish,

    In the Uk the smoking ban is used to persecute the mentally afflicted, the old, the incarcerated and the dying.

    Some terminally ill patients are leaving hospices and returning home all because they are not allowed to have a smoke in their final hours, some of the dying are being forced out into the bitter cold all for dogma, all contrary to Uk legislation

    Shame on the petty officials who are persecuting our population, smoking legislation needs overturning as soon as possible and those who are taking it to excess need prosecuting.

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  26. Can I just correct Nigel farage on the U.K Pub closure figures ,it is now 6 a day, not a week ?

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  27. Could you ask if the panel believe that the high profile amd daily promotion of smoking cessation creates a forbidden fruit that is attractive and counter-productive to reducing smoking prevalence and thus a reason to bring in even more legislation?

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  28. ::sniff:sniff:: Odd... there's that strange scent of fish in the air again... OH! It's "Anonymous" coming from another angle.

    Well, while I can't speak for Dr. Siegel or Mr. Turci, let me put my own thoughts out there for consideration... I don't think they'll be that different.

    Epidemiology is a inexact observational science, often based upon such fallible instruments as surveys based in turn upon chancy and possibly biased memories of things far in the past. It is also a science that cannot easily control confounding variables or allow for easy replication in order to rule out researcher bias.

    For all those reasons, low correlations (i.e. those under a RR of 2.0 or 3.0) are always going to be suspect: particularly when there are strong economic and political forces at work toward producing "correct" answers for a desired point of view.

    Big Tobacco is perfectly correct in pointing out those problems. That does NOT mean that epidemilogical conclusions at lower levels are worthless... simply that they need to be looked at VERY carefully for indications of confounding factors, researcher bias, chance variation, and other sources of error.

    Take a quick look at the tables on secondary smoke and lung cancer at:

    http://www.nycclash.com/Philly.html#ETSTable

    and see how many of the studies either fail the most basic epidemiological test of statistical significance or even produce results showing that smoke exposure PROTECTS against lung cancer and you'll see what I mean when I say it's difficult to base any real conclusions on such data.

    - MJM

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  29. Anonymous,
    I think it's fair to say SCOTH lost its claim to objectivity a long time ago (along with the word “Independent”). If SCOTH were composed of people with no pecuniary relationship to Big Tobacco or Big Tobacco Control then I think there would be a fair chance that we would not have abolished every single smoking venue in the UK. The HSE (while supporting The Health Act 2006) has been shown to be sceptical about the health risks of second hand smoke and it could be that if SCOTH were similarly decoupled from Big Tobacco Control, an (Independent) SCOTH could come to a similar conclusion.

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  30. Along similar lines to ChrisB really - do the panel feel that the no-smoking signs placed in all public areas in the UK actually prevent those trying to give up in doing so? Or at least, make it much harder for anyone who has chosen to give up?
    It's like free advertising really; they're reminded of smoking everywhere they go.

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  31. Am I right to say that Smoking bans have been a contributory factor in the Worldwide recession ?

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  32. Anonymous @ 11:00, that was my mistake. Mr Farage did say 6 per day.

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  33. "There are no autopsy reports that give 'passive smoking' as a primary cause of death, so how can our government say that it kills...is there no legal challenge to this?"

    The problem with Statutes, (Laws made by HMG) is that they can have whatever basis they like. If they want to ban lollipops they could if the house voted for it and as long as they followed correct procedure.

    In the US there are other considerations.

    What I would like to know, it what is the action plan? Most of what has been discussed we know already, though it is good to have it confirmed. The main issue is how to move forward in the face of such opposition.

    Some have mentioned things similar to groupthink and doublespeak, yet how are these undone?

    Do we wait for the TC movement to collapse under its own weight of non-truth. How long would that take and what damage would there be?

    If not what is the way forward?

    west
    ---

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  34. Right, I'm off to the EU building. There may be a couple of interesting pictures arising. If so, I will put them up Thursday evening, so check back here then. ;-)

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  35. Thanks for all Dick! Great conference and great blogging!

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  36. Looks like a party going on here. Mind if I join in?

    Michael J McFadden is explaining why the results of a study should be read with care if the Relative Risk falls below 2 and the results are novel. But that doesn’t apply to passive smoking, where study after study shows it increases in risk of lung cancer and heart disease. As Dimitrios Trichopoulos (Department of Epidemiology,Harvard School of Public Health) said:

    “We all take seriously small relative risks when there is a credible hypothesis in the background. Nobody disputes that the prevalence of boys at birth is higher than that of girls (an excess of 3%), that men have a 30% higher rate of death compared to women of the same age, or that fatality in a car accident is higher when the car is smaller.”

    Michael’s claims about statistical significance are also borne out of a wrongly rigid interpretation cultivated by Big Tobacco. Most studies show an increased risk of lung cancer and heart disease. And when these results are pooled, the results consistently show a statistically significant added risk. Yes, meta-analyses and pooled studies should be conducted with care. But as far as I can tell, the likes of Hackshaw et al(1997), He et al (1999), IARC (2004) and SCOTH (2004) all were.

    Isn't it funny how pro-smokers continue to complain about an out-of-date meta-analysis (EPA (1992)) but conveniently ignore more recent studies which take more evidence into account?

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  37. Fredrik - You claim the independence of SCOTH was hopelessly tainted. Can you tell me what their conclusions would have been if they had been "independent" in your view? Especially since the conclusions they reached were entirely consistent with earlier evaluations of evidence, such as the ones I mentioned in my last post.

    And HSE has always accepted the increased risks of passive smoking. Where they said it would be difficult would be in proving passive smoking as a cause of illness to a SPECIFIC INDIVIDUAL.

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  38. Dick
    Thanks for this and for getting our questions raised to the panel.

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  39. Rollo,
    Show us some death certificates caused by SHS please ?

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  40. Congratulations on a job well done Dick.

    Lets see what comes of the press conference and following press release eh? It's going to be very interesting.

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  41. Chris W: Can you show death certificates caused by diesel fumes, UV light or radon gas? Are they safe?

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  42. Just would like to mention that Smoking bans must be the greatest waste of money ever, millions upon millions of pounds wasted.

    Male smoking prevalence has increased in the UK by 1%, Female smoking rates have remained static.

    The only comparison that I can think of is the Gulf war where millions upon millions of pounds have also been wasted.

    You can draw a comparison here between weapons of mass destruction they were fictitious and the supposed people who have died from SHS also fictitious

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  43. Excellent blogging DP.

    Rollo:"Can you tell me what their conclusions would have been if they had been "independent" in your view? "

    SCOTH admitted that they had not strictly applied the Bradford-Hills criteria of causation. There was a large element of 'Judgement' involved. Another group may have formed a different opinion.

    west
    ----

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  44. Rollo,
    No but we all know diesel fumes are definately deadly ,don,t know much about Radon?
    Many deaths have been caused by suicide using car emmisions in an enclosed space which would only take minutes ! ,never heard of people losing their life in a locked garage with a hundred cigarettes burning as they would be there untill they died of old age ?

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  45. Farage replies saying that although he understands the sentiment, he feels a compromise is more realistic, restores choice, and gives government a way of relaxing legislation without losing face.

    Isn't this the same kind of appeasing approach that landed us with the ban in the first place? It also doesn't overcome the legal abomination of the government redefining private property as a 'public space'.

    And I want this government to lose face! I want this government to hang its head in shame at its fascist treason and slink off to the nearest penitentiary to make amends for its crimes.

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  46. Thanks for the blog Dick - excellent work

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  47. Anonymous: Here's a quote from SCOTH 1998: "All of the available information has been evaluated in accordance with our guidelines and also with regard to the criteria proposed by Sir Austin Bradford-Hill."

    You claim "Another group may have formed a different opinion." How do you know that? What view do you think another group should have formed, based on the available evidence? As I said, the SCOTH results are not isolated- they're reinforced by other pooled studies and meta-analyses.

    ChrisW: Carbon monoxide from exhausts (not diesel particulates) are a cause of suicide. Crumbs, even Freedom2Choose's chairman, Colin Grainger, admits passive smoking can be deadly for asthma sufferers.

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  48. Dick, thanks for the great reporting and Blog.

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  49. Rollo, if enough money was invested into research and propaganda re the effects of diesel fumes, UV light, radon gas (and a multitude other other potentially harmful environmental things), the heat would certainly be taken off tobacco. Can't imagine pharmaceutical companies would see much profit potential by sponsoring such research though.

    It's rather ironic that all of these have 'passive' effects (unless of course you attach a tube to a car exhaust to commit suicide, or spend too much time on a sun bed) - all have been shown to detrimental to health. Come on, if you can kill yourself in less than 30 mins by breathing in carbon monoxide in a sealed car, surely there has to be relative dangers associated with general traffic pollution? Think about it - nobody ever killed themselves by smoking a cigarettes in a sealed car continuously for 30mins, so highly diluted tobacco smoke can't really pose much of a threat.

    Let's get things into perspective and apply a little common sense - the presumed risks of SHS do not justify current smoking bans.

    David

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  50. Rollo,
    You remind me of Jehovas Witnesses ,splitting hairs to try and convince and convert us that what they say is the truth without any sound scientific evidence ?( i,m not personally against any religion by the way )

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  51. David

    I believe passive smoking is in the right perspective.

    Passive smoking is estimated to cause around 11,000 premature deaths in the UK alone each year. Compare that with 3,000 deaths from road traffic accidents, for example. Yet we rightly expect our roads and cars to be as safe as they reasonably can be.

    Smokers are still allowed to smoke. All they need to do is ensure they do not do so in enclosed public spaces where their smoking can put the health of those around them at risk.

    Yes, the risks of passive smoking are in perspective.

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  52. ChrisW: You accuse me of not having sound scientific evidence.

    But you don't challenge the evidence I give you.

    And you don't offer alternative scientific evidence of your own.

    You expect me to believe you, based on nothing more than blind trust.

    I'm not against religion either. But your stance seems to be like that of a religious cult.

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  53. Dick...

    Thank you very much for the updates over the last two days - it's heartwarming to know that people like yourself are trying to raise awareness that this hardline, unreasonable blanket ban is causing distress to so many.

    I smoke, my husband does not. If we go out to our local pub, I'm not just socially excluded from my fellow drinkers, I'm socially excluded from my own husband! Memories of last winter when I was outside a pub on the south coast drawing messages on the window pane to my husband inside - you have to smile or you would burst into tears in frustration.

    I sincerely hope that commonsense will prevail and that the law will be readjusted to become the partial ban it was intended to be in order to accommodate non-smokers and smokers alike, particularly applicable in pubs and clubs.

    Once again, thank you for your excellent reporting.

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  54. Rollo quoted "SCOTH 1998: "All of the available information has been evaluated in accordance with our guidelines and also with regard to the criteria proposed by Sir Austin Bradford-Hill."

    They had regard to. I suggested they did not strictly follow. Read the report, as they do discuss particular critera (time for example) and say that the criteria are not strictly met.

    Rollo: quoted west "Another group may have formed a different opinion." Added "How do you know that? ". Rollo, they are using judgement and so the result is an opinion. If another group relied on a strict interpretation of B/H then they could not have come to any conclusions about causality. SCOTH itself admits that SHS does not fulfill all the criteria.

    west
    ----

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  55. West: I don't have time to check SCOTH now (I'm heading out).

    But I don't get your point anyway. You're suggesting that no conclusions about causality can be reached unless all 9 of Bradford-Hill's criteria are met. That is a totally mistaken suggestion to make. Bradford-Hill made clear he did not require this.

    "What I do not believe – and this has been suggested – that we can usefully lay down some hard-and-fast rules of evidence that must be obeyed before we can accept cause and effect. None of my nine viewpoints can bring indisputable evidence for or against the cause-and-effect hypothesis and NONE CAN BE REQUIRED AS A SINE QUA NON [my emphasis]. What they can do, with greater or less strength, is to help us to make up our minds on the fundamental question – is there any other way of explaining the set of facts before us, is there any other answer equally, or more, likely than cause and effect?"

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  56. Anonymous, who corrupted the defintion of sound epidemiologic practice?

    Sir Richard Doll
    " ... when the relative risk lies between 1 and 2 ... problems of interpretation may become acute, and it may be extremely difficult to disentangle the various contributions of biased information, confounding of two or more factors, and cause and effect."
    (The Causes of Cancer," by Richard Doll, F.R.S. and Richard Peto. Oxford-New York, Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 1219).

    WHO/IARC
    Relative risks of less than 2.0 may readily reflect some unperceived bias or confounding factor, those over 5.0 are unlikely to do so. - Breslow and Day, 1980, Statistical methods in cancer research, Vol. 1, The analysis of case control studies. Published by the World Health Organization, International Agency for Research on Cancer, Sci. Pub. No. 32, Lyon, p. 36

    FDA
    "My basic rule is if the relative risk isn't at least 3 or 4, forget it." - Robert Temple, M.D. Food and Drug Administration Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Letters, September 8, 1999

    IAQC
    "An association is generally considered weak if the odds ratio [relative risk] is under 3.0 and particularly when it is under 2.0, as is the case in the relationship of ETS and lung cancer." - Dr. Kabat, IAQC epidemiologist

    US National Cancer Institute
    "Relative risks of less than 2 are considered small and are usually difficult to interpret. Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias, or the effect of confounding factors [other causes] that are sometimes not evident"

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  57. Rollo,
    I HAVE read some scientific evidence like the Enstom and Kabatt report which spanned some 38 years ,a lot longer than the Scoth ! and what I have read has a lot more credibility to it than Scoth !and common sense to it as well, tell me how can someone inhale concentrated amounts of tobacco smoke for decades with no ill affects yet you expect us to believe a very fraction of this can be deadly , it dosn,t add up ?

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  58. Very quick points:

    Ben: If you bother checking original sources, you will find the quotes about Relative Risk refer to ISOLATED studies, not a large body of evidence as exists for passive smoking. Pro-smoking groups are often prone to selective misquoting. This is one set of examples.

    Chris W: The data behind Enstrom and Kabat's work did not span 38 years. It spanned some 12 years, ending as long ago as 1972. SCOTH's report stated that if E&K's conclusions were considered alongside other evidence on passive smoking, they would make barely any difference to SCOTH's overall estimate of Relative Risk for lung cancer or heart disease.

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  59. Anonymous said...

    " how much i get paid : nothing at all.

    i just happen to like honesty."

    I've read a few things you have said Anonymous and want to add a few things here.

    I, like you, and many people here, like honesty too, that is why I link to my blog and give my real name and my real interests. If you don't already know I run the office for Freedom2Choose and receive nothing in the form of payment apart from the usual office running costs, this is well documented on our forum and all monies recieved here are open to scrutiny. I can say categorically that at no time did we recieve money from vested intrests, but rather from individuals that realise that something is rotten in the prohibitionist camp!

    As for TICAP and this conference, I have been party to online meetings in a secretarial capacity and the 'payment' of scientific attendees was spoken about exhaustively and it was concluded that only their traveling expenses should be looked into, as you would with any conference you wanted debatees to attend, no wrongding there, is there?

    If, on the other hand, you refer to their past employment and wish to use this as a tool to berate the conference then I can only point in the direction of the miriad of 'smoke free' conferences that have taken place over the past couple of years! There are two sides to a story but not, it seems, in the 'smoke free' lobby!

    As for transperancy...you are as transparent as a figure in a room full of smoke! Be truthful, SHOW YOURSELF!

    John H Baker
    Office (F2C)

    ReplyDelete
  60. Rollo: "Most studies show an increased risk of lung cancer and heart disease."
    Some 80% of which are not statistically significant.

    "And when these results are pooled, the results consistently show a statistically significant added risk."
    How can you pool completely different studies with no common basis, without being statsitically significant and get a statistically significant result? Miracles!

    Have a look at some of the studies incorportated into the 2006 SG's report. Some of the studies have fewer than 15 cases. It's like rolling dices 15 times and pretending to have reached a statsitically significant result.

    Hace a look at the regional studies incorporated into the IARC report. Some of the regions show statistically significant negative risks, just like the risk of children in the final result.
    Which goes to show that by selecting the right "regions" (= data mining) you can get any result you like.

    ReplyDelete
  61. I would also like to add my sincere gratitude to Dick Puddlecote for his insightful commentary on the TICAP conference that never was!

    Your commentary has been an eye opener, even to these jaded eyes. Well done Dick.

    John H Baker

    ReplyDelete
  62. Dick, you've done a fantastic job.
    Thankyou

    ReplyDelete
  63. Rollo talks about 'data mining!' by the PRO CHOICE movement and pays no attention to how governments came to smoking bans! He's taking the piss, surely!!! Smoking bans have only been enacted BECAUSE of anti tobacco Nazis SELECTIVE DATA MINING of junk science to further their anti freedom of choice stand!

    John H Baker

    ReplyDelete
  64. Rollo Tomassi, or is it Tobacco Control
    mouthpiece.

    This might enlighten you about Radon.

    The radioactive gas radon is a hazard in many homes and workplaces. Breathing in radon is the second largest cause of lung cancer in the UK resulting in up to 2000 fatal cancers per year. However radon hazards are simple and cheap to measure and relatively easy to address if levels are high. Under UK regulations all employers must review the potential radon hazard in their premises.


    http://www.hse.gov.uk/radiation/ionising/radon.htm

    Laird of Glencairn

    ReplyDelete
  65. Breast Cancer an Environmental Disease


    www.nomorebreastcancer.org.uk/assets/summary_v1.pdf

    Some very interesting comments about Pharmaceutical companies, Cancer organisations
    and Government.


    Laird of Glencairn

    ReplyDelete
  66. Rollo: "You're suggesting that no conclusions about causality can be reached unless all 9 of Bradford-Hill's criteria are met."

    I did not suggest that. You asked why I thought a different group of people may come to a different view.

    My point was clear. SCOTH had regard to and discussed Hill's criteria. They gave reasons for their view. Another group of people may take a different view especially when attributing causality.

    This is especially true with regard to criteria 2 Strength. SCOTH admit this criteria is not fulfilled because of low exposure.

    Others would take the view that that a strong association is required before causality can be determined. (Note the discussion of RR by other commentators).

    Many people suggest that a weak association is more likely spurious or as a result of bias.

    west
    ----

    ReplyDelete
  67. Lol Rollo;

    You're as deluded as your Nazi mate "Anonymous".

    I see you're as quick to blame the tobacco industry for unfavourable scientific standard as you are to associate anyone who ever worked with the tobacco industry for something a tobacco company said decades ago.

    On the first count you are talking from the wrong end of your body and on the second you share Fascist tendencies with your buddy.

    Dr. Marcia Angell, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the world’s leading medical journals, says, “As a general rule, we are looking for a relative risk of 3.0 or more.” Dr. Robt. Temple, director of drug evaluation for the FDA, says, “My basic rule is if the relative risk isn’t at least 3 or 4, forget it.” And the EPA declined to regulate high-voltage power lines because it said the RRs seldom exceeded 3.0.

    And what's all this rubbish about low RR's can count if there are a lot of them and your lie that most show risks for lung cancer?

    More than 92% of ALL studies into lung cancer and ETS show no risk whatsoever and of the remaining less than 8%, just as many show a protective effect as show harm.

    Don't take my word for it, there are copies of every one of them here: http://www.data-yard.net/science/assorted/ets_lc_table.pdf

    Here's some other RR's bigger than your "best" ETS junk. Should we ban bread?

    Smoking adjusted increased Risk Ratio’s for lung cancer from certain professions;

    Cleaners 2.7 (1.0-7.4)
    Bakers 5.7 (1.4-24)
    Tailors 6.9 (1.2-39)
    Plumbers and pipe fitters 2.6 (1.0-6.4)
    Welders and flame-cutters 5.6 (2.1-15)

    Any more made up anti propaganda you want to vomit around the internet? Are you paid to do it or are you just that stupid?

    ReplyDelete
  68. Rollo: "you will find the quotes about Relative Risk refer to ISOLATED studies, not a large body of evidence"

    If you compile a large number of isolated weak studies (selectively, biased), I don't see how together they can become strong evidence.
    The science of statistics is different from counting votes.

    ReplyDelete
  69. You are correct Ben and as I pointed out Rollo's "large body of evidence" actually shows no risk so even if it were the same as "counting votes" it wouldn't make his claim any better.

    Nothing plus nothing plus nothing still equals nothing.

    Even when the antis cherry picked the studies (like SCOTH aka ASH/Pharma did)they ignored differing methodologies, bias and confounding and still only came up with 1:20

    It just gives them a made up, relative and scary sounding percentage to fuel the health scare media. "Passive smokers are 20% more likely to get lung cancer" they cry, which is of course completely meaningless; 20% more likely than who? where did they find groups of never passive smokers to compare them to? How did they measure how much passive smoke someone had inhaled during their life? How did they measure anything else they might have inhaled?

    It's junk of the highest order and there are only two types of people who promote it, those who are paid to do it and those who don't like washing their clothes after a night out.

    ReplyDelete
  70. Very good comments guys - many thanks for an entertaining and illuminating exchange.

    Obviously massive thanks for the blog though - your fingers must be pretty sore mate..

    ReplyDelete
  71. Oh Rollo, Roooollllllooooo. Helloeee. Anybody out there?

    *Tumbleweed blows thru*

    BHJ

    ReplyDelete
  72. Awwww BHJ, did you miss me?

    Both the Big Yin (14:35) and Steve (20:24) claim that epidemiological evidence is based on cherry-picked studies. Really? Would either of you like to reel of this list of studies which were supposedly ignored by Law et al (1997), Hackshaw et al (1997), He et al (1999), IARC (2004) or SCOTH (2004)?

    Ben (13:12), meanwhile, complains that some of the cases which have been included in analyses are small. Yes, sometimes that’s true……because the studies have NOT been cherry-picked. Obviously, larger studies carry more weight in the final analysis than smaller studies.

    The Laird of Glencairn (14:50) seems to think I doubt the dangers of radon gas. Actually, I accept that radon gas is hazardous. Only I defy you to point me to radon gas being on a death certificate. My point is to show how irrelevant an argument it is to claim that something is safe just because it is not referred to on a death certificate.

    West (15:19): I don’t get your point. Bradford-Hill that the 9 criteria need to be viewed collectively, and a judgement based on that. Some of those criteria might be fulfilled more strongly than others, but it’s the overall assessment that counts. You claim another group of people may have taken a different view to SCOTH. Hypothetically, you may be right. Only they didn’t. And others who have looked at the same evidence have reached the same conclusions as SCOTH (e.g. Hackshaw et al (1997), Law et al (1997), He et al (1999), IARC (2004) and the US Surgeon General (2006)). So your point doesn’t mean anything.

    ReplyDelete
  73. Steve: I’ve saved most of my comments for you….because you’re talking absolute mince.

    I warned already about misquoting. Yet that is exactly what you do in your 18:46 post. And tell me - why did you chop off the end of Marcia Angell’s quote, which was “particularly if it is biologically implausible or if it's a brand-new finding"? Were you ignorant (not checking the original source for yourself) or did you deliberately attempt to lie?

    Marcia Angell and Robert Temple were talking about the Relative Risk required to demonstrate cause when the only evidence is a SINGLE study which makes a novel or counter-intuitive finding. That absolutely does NOT apply when there is a large body of evidence on an issue, as is the case with passive smoking.

    To further prove my point (and Ben (19:34) might wish to note this too) the He et al meta-analysis of supposedly “weak” studies, concluded that ”Passive smoking is associated with a small increase in the risk of coronary heart disease. Given the high prevalence of cigarette smoking, the public health consequences of passive smoking with regard to coronary heart disease may be important”. So even a supposedly small increase in risk can lead to a major public health concern – causing thousands of premature deaths in the UK alone each year. And where was this study published? Why, in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1999 – while Marcia Angell was editing there.

    Your claim that “More than 92% of ALL studies into lung cancer and ETS show no risk whatsoever” is absolutely rubbish. As I said to Michael J McFadden, your claim is based on pseudo-science – a notion that a rigid 95% confidence interval rule applies to every study. The great majority of studies show that exposure to passive smoking increases the risk of lung cancer or heart disease. While they may not be statistically significant as individual studies, collectively they corroborate each other and form an increasingly compelling body of evidence, as evidenced by the meta-analyses. If you think I’m wrong, show me professional literature which says you’re right.

    You then raise questions about how these studies were conducted. Only, you don’t try to read the studies for yourself to find answers. You just blindly assume that these were not considered, when in fact considerable effort is usually made to address potential confounders. Those are the comments of a closed-minded bigot.

    ReplyDelete
  74. Here's a Comix I've done that I'm sure everyone at the Conference will get a kick out of. If you want to, you have my permission to display it.
    Cheers.

    INCREDIBLE TWIT, STANDING BEHIND A CAR'S TAILPIPE AND SCREAMING AT SMOKER FOR "KILLING" HIM.

    http://fwt.txdnl.com/6-10/i/n/infinitethoughts/smog%20smoking1.JPG

    ReplyDelete
  75. http://fwt.txdnl.com/6-10/i/n/infinitethoughts/smog%20smoking1.JPG

    (website got cut off.)

    ReplyDelete
  76. Arrrggh. Happened again.

    http://fwt.txdnl.com/6-10/i/n/
    infinitethoughts/smog%20smoking1.JPG

    ReplyDelete
  77. @Rollo:
    " You claim another group of people may have taken a different view to SCOTH. Hypothetically, you may be right. Only they didn’t. And others who have looked at the same evidence have reached the same conclusions as SCOTH (e.g. Hackshaw et al (1997), Law et al (1997), He et al (1999), IARC (2004) and the US Surgeon General (2006)). So your point doesn’t mean anything."

    You dismiss my claim with a counter-claim that 'others' came to the same conclusion.

    Were they 'others' though?

    Without going into too much detail and looking at the relationship between SCOTH and two of the reports you cite ( Hacksaw et al (1997) and Law et al (1997))we find:-

    Law and Wald are listed as co-authors with Hackshaw.

    On Law et al, Law is listed as a co-author.

    Professor Nicholas Wald was on the original SCOTH comittee

    Hackshaw, Law and Wald were all cited as helping with the SCOTH update in 2004.

    So not quite 'others' is it?

    Neither of these studies (meta-analysis) appear to discuss Hills criteria when assessing causality.

    SCOTH 1998 used Hills criteria and dismissed Criteria 2: why?

    west
    ----

    ReplyDelete
  78. Mistype correction
    On law et al. Law is listed as a co-author
    should read
    On law et al, Ward is listed as a co-author

    west
    ----

    ReplyDelete
  79. "You claim the independence of SCOTH was hopelessly tainted.
    Can you tell me what their conclusions would have been if they had been "independent" in your view? " - Rollo

    No, I don't know what conclusions they would make if they were independent of professional tobacco control advocacy.
    But I am sure that tobacco control embedded in SCOTH is better placed to present the truth to the public as it sees it.

    "Especially since the conclusions they reached were entirely consistent with earlier evaluations of evidence, such as the ones I mentioned in my last post. And HSE has always accepted the increased risks of passive smoking. Where they said it would be difficult would be in proving passive smoking as a cause of illness to a SPECIFIC INDIVIDUAL." - Rollo


    We have been here before Rollo and it's the same problem as before. The evidence that smoking causes lung cancer is "so strong" that (in the McTear case) the harm theory could not even demonstrate that smoking causes lung cancer in people who smoke, let alone a SPECIFIC INDIVIDUAL person. So its not surprising that the HSE wanted to keep the whole area of enforcement of the Health Act 2006 firmly out of it's hands. I think in the absence of tobacco control the HSE would probably not have supported abolishing smoking venues because if it adopted a zero risk approach to all aspects of its work non of us would have jobs.
    For example banning alcohol in pubs would be a good zero risk approach to protect staff from “alcohol related” violence.
    This would not stop people from going to pubs, it just means that people will have to drink soft drinks instead ...

    ReplyDelete
  80. West: I have given you 6 sources of pooled analyses. There were plenty of other people involved.

    And SCOTH did not “dismiss” the criterion of strength. They concluded that available evidence was not sufficient to satisfy the criterion. But, ENTIRELY IN ACCORDANCE WITH BRADFORD-HILL’S PRINCIPLES, they looked at the criteria as a whole. They found that 6 of the criteria were met in full and one in part. That was enough to justify their conclusion that passive smoking presents a real risk of lung cancer and heart disease.

    You have still not given any evidence as to why their assessment is “wrong” and what a “correct” assessment would look like.

    ReplyDelete
  81. Fredrik: You choose to accuse SCOTH of being tainted. Yet you cannot say whether their report would have looked any different had it been completely “independent” in your eyes. And you forget that plenty of other assessments of evidence have reached exactly the same conclusion as SCOTH did. Do you really think they only do so because they’re all tainted?

    As for the HSE document, yes we have been here before. There is the world of different between public health policy, which is about protecting the public at large (in the case of passive smoking, from a threat which kills thousands of people in the UK each year), and what courts of law have to deal with – which is whether a specific individual succumbed to that threat.

    Of course, the McTear case was about primary smoking, not passive smoking. In that case, Lord Nimmo Smith did conclude that the evidence presented to him in that case had not enabled him to conclude that there is definite general causation between smoking and lung cancer (pretty much as you say). You may already realise this, but I should stress: he reached that decision based on the evidence presented to him, not on all the evidence available about the association between smoking and lung cancer.

    I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make about HSE not wanting to enforce the Health Act 2006. But that is very different from a claim that HSE doubted the dangers of passive smoking.

    Finally, while you’re free to claim that “I think in the absence of tobacco control the HSE would probably not have supported abolishing smoking venues, you’re making an accusation with no evidence to back it up with.

    ReplyDelete
  82. Anonymous
    To be perfectly honest, I don't only care about the disputes over SHS ( I know that is the only argument that the anti-smokers can rely upon), I care about all the other arguments in relation to smoking bans as well, and there are many.

    At the end of the day - like it or lump it - smoking is perfectly legal. It is highly taxed and many people choose to smoke.

    This being the case, what is wrong with catering for those who choose to smoke and those who do not? This can easily be accommodated for as it is in many countries within Europe.

    Any other viewpoint to me is an extremist one, ie, it's either my way or nothing. Very sinister to me as I look back in history.

    ReplyDelete
  83. Rollo at 12:58: "The data behind Enstrom and Kabat's work did not span 38 years. It spanned some 12 years, ending as long ago as 1972."

    Go away, Rollo. The data spans 38 years. You are a troll.

    ReplyDelete
  84. Rollo, you are every bit the deluded Nazi as your colleagues.

    I posted the link that proves over 92% over the ETS lung cancer studies show NO RISK; every one of them is on that site and yet you still live in denial lol. Despite your made up comment to the contrary yes I have read them, the full studies are all on that same site if you wish to do the same. Sorry to burst the bubble you live in.

    You clearly know nothing about epidemiology other than what you read in the anti smoking bible so you may need some help to dream up answers the questions:

    Where did they find a control group of never passive smokers to make the claim - passive smokers are 20% more likely...?"

    How did they correct for differing methodology in their meta analysis?

    How did they measure lifetime exposure to passive smoke given that the highest medical authority in the world admits that is impossible?

    How did they measure anything else that was inhaled?

    You say that larger statistical analysis "carry more weight". This shows that you know nothing about statistical analysis. In reality larger samples only reduce the width of the interval; if they give a different result then something in the methodology was flawed. How does a meta analysis control for that?

    By what mathematical method does adding a body of larger studies together turn weak and flawed statistical correlation into causation?

    You better go back and consult the anti smoking bible again; it's the fairy tale with the big swastika on the front.

    ReplyDelete
  85. Soren - I disagree.

    The CPS-I study was conducted between 1959 and 1972. In that time, there were follow-up questionnaires of participants in 1961, 1963 and 1965, as well as in 1972. There was no follow-up at all in the intervening 26 years.

    What Enstrom & Kabat did was one-off follow-up on a small proportion only of the people involved in CPS-I in 1998. They obtained details of only 81,000 of the 1.08m participants. Of this 81,000, 74,000 had died in the intervening years. E&K had no knowledge of these deceased people’s lifestyles in the period between 1972 and when they died. Did they stop smoking? Did their spouse stop smoking? Did their spouse die? Did they divorce and/or find a new partner? The researchers would not have known and could only make assumptions about the deceased participants’ lifestyles. E&K only had some information about lifestyle until 1998 in 7,000 of the original 1.08m CPS-I participants.

    In summary, Enstrom & Kabat obtained follow-up information about lifestyle until 1998 from only 7,000 surviving CPS-I participants. So the data spanned 38 years for 0.7% of the CPS-I participants. But it covered less than 13 years for the remaining 99.3%.

    ReplyDelete
  86. The hypocrisy of Steve! On the one hand, you falsely accuse me of consulting “anti-smoking bibles”. On the other hand, your understanding of epidemiological science requirements is one which only pro-smoking groups hold.

    I asked you to point me to professional literature which shows that your understanding is right. I see you haven’t done that. Why is that, exactly?

    You continue to raise a number of questions about how studies were undertaken. Why don’t you go away and find out for yourself? That’s what I did. But then, I do believe in knowing facts before I start throwing accusations.

    You still haven’t told me – why did you misquote Marcia Angell? Was it ignorance? Or was it a deliberate attempt to lie?

    As for the obligatory Nazi references, the defining Nazi image for me is how they forced thousand upon thousand of innocent people to die each year through exposure to lethal gases, and all the while they denied this was happening. Much like pro-smokers nowadays, in fact. So who really is the Nazi?

    ReplyDelete
  87. Rollo, you wrote this on Tuesday,

    'Passive smoking is estimated to cause around 11,000 premature deaths in the UK alone each year.'

    Whose estimate Rollo?

    Would this estimation refer to pharmaceutical financed research, the results of which are cherry picked and disseminated by government funded smoking cessation groups?

    Why is it that the majority of anti smokers never concede, nor even consider, that tobacco control has no other motive than the desire to improve public health?

    David

    ReplyDelete
  88. Rollo,
    I am only speculating as to whether SCOTH would draw different conclusions if it did not have tobacco control embedded with in it. But if Lord Nimmo Smith were a member of SCOTH then maybe it would conclude that while there is a link between smoking and lung cancer there is not enough evidence to show a causal relationship. Look at it this way, Wynder/Doll/... established the fact that
    people who get lung cancer smoke more. This has been shown to be true time and time again. But beyond the observation that sick people are more likely to smoke, the causal theory can not be proven in a court of law.
    Hence, smoking is not proven to cause lung cancer, smoking is not proven to kill. This is why Tobacco Control needs to be disestablished from the state. SCOTH would be the natural place to start. It needs to be independent again.

    ReplyDelete
  89. __-Steve-__ said :
    "More than 92% of ALL studies into lung cancer and ETS show no risk whatsoever and of the remaining less than 8%, just as many show a protective effect as show harm.
    Don't take my word for it, there are copies of every one of them here: http://www.data-yard.net/science/assorted/ets_lc_table.pdf"

    What's strange is that this table doesn't take in account the studies done by the tobacco industries themselves.
    Those studies had been forced to be made public thanks to the Master Settlement Agreement, and now everyone can access them, here for example: http://www.pmdocs.com/

    All those studies arrives to the same conclusion: "We will never find an unbiased scientist who concludes that ETS exposure has been proven safe for non-smokers."

    A big summary of all that can be found on a document that is DIRECTLY on the web site of Altria, company owner of Philip Morris:
    http://www.altria.com/download/pdf/media_doj_08172006_final_opinion.pdf
    (page 1239: "Internally, Defendants Recognized that ETS Is Hazardous to Nonsmokers")

    So, how is it that those studies, that all found that secondhand smokes is dangerous, are not taken in account in the link you gave?
    And, if there is really no risks whatsoever, why are the tobacco industries internally conviced of the contrary ?

    ReplyDelete
  90. Kylegl, quite simply because it is the Tobacco industry's favour to find smoking as harmful. Why? Because they can't be sued. Why do you think they willingly put warnings on packets in countries where they're not required to by law? For the same reason. You see, if the tobacco industry came out and said "we have proven SHS is harmless, don't worry about it" and then subsequently got lung cancer they would be able to sue the tobacco company and win.

    You cannot prove a negative, i.e. that something does NOT do something else. As such, it can't be proven that smoking doesn't cause cancer or anything else, all we can have is supporting evidence. As Bertrand Russell once said, if the claim is made that a teapot is floating around space then it cannot be disproved because it can't be seen, but that doesn't mean the opposite is true i.e. that it does exist.

    So in other words, the tobacco companies can't prove SHS is harmless, and they don't want to. They WANT to show it as harmful to protect themselves. In short, the Master Settlement and all the hoo-ha about SHS and active smoking works in their favour by guaranteed immunity against any attacks by the anti's or the public.

    The statement that no unbiased scientist will find SHS harmless is unequivocally wrong - because unbiased scientists HAVE said so. Burch, Fisher, Eysenck as starters, and not to forget Whitby either. It amuses me that non-smokers consider Big Tobacco to be evil and untrustworthy, but as soon as they speak out against their product they must be telling the truth - spare a minute to think why they don't want people to think smoking is harmless

    ReplyDelete
  91. Let us also not forget that both Doll and Wynder conceded that they wrong about smoking/cancer.

    On the issue of SCOTH, why are we continually attacked of only rejecting it for tobacco control involvement? Not true at all. It is RIFE with problems, and i am currently in talks with the department of health about it.

    Firstly, it is Scientific Committee on Smoking OR Health - why 'or' and not 'and'? That straight away shows they treat smoking as something separate, something to be treated in its own agenda.

    Second, it was the government's own report so everyone should have known what the results were - it was produced simply to be used as a tool to make smokefree laws.

    Third, it contained no new science at all, only reviewed existing studies - and only ones that supported what they wanted to hear.

    Fourth, despite being touted as a report on the effects of second hand smoke on non-smokers, the bulk of it actually focuses on active smoking and effects on smokers, not non-smokers.

    Fifth, middle age is defined as being between 35 and 69 years of age – which is high by any standards, given the UK life expectancy is 74 for men and 79 for women. So we can see from this that they willingly used misleading numbers to produce the desired results. In addition to this, the SCOTH report ignored the fact that almost 40% of the 120,000 deaths attributed to smoking occur in both males and females who are above the life expectancy.

    Sixth, in the Environmental Tobacco Smoke section, point 2.7, a reference is made to a report by the Australian National Health & Medical Research Council (NHMRC) from November 1997. This report was blocked from release by an Australian court because the NHMRC had failed in discharging its statutory duty of public consultation. In April 1997 Simon Chapman, of the working party on the report, stated that the calculations of risk to non-smokers who were exposed to second hand smoke to non-smokers were so low that journalists “will be hard pressed to write anything other than ‘Official: passive smoking cleared-no lung cancer’.” (Free Choice, May/June 1997)

    Seventh, recommendation number 30 actually acknowledges there are beneficial effects of smoking and more research needs to be done. Tell me, was THIS mentioned in the news? Has any word on the research come out? Have they come clean about smokers having lower rates of MAOI's than non-smokers, or that Co Enzyme Q10 is extracted from the tobacco leaf, or that smokers have higher levels of the 'fountain of youth' enzyme? That smokers have double the amount of SOD "the elixir of life" than non-smokers? Glutathione is the body's chief antioxidant and metal detoxifier and is much higher in smokers (http://jap.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstract/63/1/152?ijkey=3ea8cff64c6d72a42e1d4ef7cf9f6fd2485e5921&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha) With the researcher stating:
    “Compared with nonsmokers, cigarette smokers had 80% higher levels of ELF total glutathione, 98% of which was in the reduced form”

    Yet, I haven't heard any of this in the news, have you?

    Even Doll found that inhalers suffered less lung cancer than non-inhalers, something that we certainly aren't told. There are plenty of scientists who have reported on the apparent paradox of smokers suffering less lung cancer, including: Axelson & Associates (Scandinavian Journal of Environmental Health 41:46 1978), Dahlgren (Lakartidingen 76:4811 1979), Weiss (Journal of Occupational Medicine 18:194 1976 and 22,527 1980), Pinto and Associates (Archives of Environmental Health 33:325 1978). The general consensus on these findings are that tobacco smoking promotes mucous formation, which acts as a protective coating in the lungs which can, in turn, prevent carcinogenic particles penetrating the lung tissue – as shown in the study with mice and radiation. For those unfamiliar with it, every animal exposed to radiation has died, simple as that. The only exception is when mice exposed to tobacco smoke were then exposed to radiation, where only 60% died.

    ReplyDelete
  92. I can't believe, Rollo, that you're praising the SCOTH for keeping with Bradford-Hill. Wait, I can believe it. But let's just establish something: B-H was not a guy to be trusted, I hope by now you are familiar with why we shouldn't trust Doll, and B-H worked with him. Before Doll died he even admitted, writing in the December 2001 issue of the British Medical Journal, that the study was “devised by Sir Austin Bradford Hill to achieve maximum publicity for the critical link between smoking and lung cancer”

    So yet another anti-smoker with a specific agenda

    ReplyDelete
  93. Rollo, I trust you are well and good to cross swords with you again. I do believe SCOTH was a lobby/politically motivated piece of work, and have a new task for 2009. There are 71 papers cited at the back and I am going through all of them one by one to read what they say. On Statistical significance this is a direct quote from SCOTH, even they admit the number are insignificant. I have for balance left the rest of the words in. It is page 5 "SHS and Lung Cancer"

    "In most studies considered individually the observed odds ratios failed to reach statistical significance. They were nevertheless comfortably within the confidence limits of the pooled odds from the 1997 meta-analysis presented to SCOTH (1) of 1.24 (95% confidence interval

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  94. Here is number 25 of SCOTH and yes Peter Lee the statistician has done paid consultancy for tobacco companies.

    "Hackshaw et al. estimated that adjustment for bias due to misclassification of smoking habits reduces the ob served relative risk of lung cancer in non-smoking wom en associated with smoking by the husband from 1.24 to 1.18. This bias estimate is little affected by using an alter native method for misclassification adjustment or by using updated data from 47 studies rather than data from the 37 studies used by Hackshaw et al. The bias is increased if strong evidence of much higher misclassifi cation rates in Asian women is taken into account and could then explain about half the observed association. Misclassification correction has not previously been at tempted for dose-response data. We describe a suggest ed approach and apply it to data relating risk to amount smoked by the husband. As shown in paper II of this series the unadjusted increase in risk per 10 cigarettes/ day smoked by the husband is 10% (95% Cl 5 to 15%), reducing to either 6% (95% Cl 1 to 11 %) or 9% (95% Cl 5 to 14%) after adjustment for confounding by fruit, vege table and fat consumption and education using respec tively unweighted or weighted means to combine evi dence on the ETS/confounder association from different studies. Further adjustment for plausible levels of mis classification similarly reduced these two estimates to, respectively, 2% (95% Cl -3 to 8%) or 5.5% (95% Cl 0 to 11 %). Difficulties in applying misclassification bias cor rections are discussed. Other sources of bias will be con sidered in later papers in this series."

    http://ibe.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/10/6/384

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  95. Rollo, you have opened a can of worms, BTW Enstrom/Kabat is number 20 in SCOTH. This pearl from the SCOTH Committee is number 25.

    "We examine in detail arguments put forward to support the claim that exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) increases the risk of lung cancer in non-smokers. Hackshaw et al. [Br Med J 1997;315:980-988] have esti mated that the risk increases by 23% (95% Cl 14-32%) per 10 cigarettes/day smoked by the husband. The esti mated increase essentially disappears if proper adjust ment is made for smoking misclassification bias, if cor rection is made for the joint effects of confounding by fruit, vegetables, dietary fat and education, if errors in published data in one study are corrected, and if results from all pertinent studies are included (and not just those which report risk by level of smoking by the husband). Taking account of all these factors and using un- weighted estimates of the association between ETS exposure and the confounding variables (as one very large study reported results discrepant from those for numer ous smaller studies), the risk increase per 10 cigarettes/ day was found to be 2% (95% Cl -3 to +7.5%), based on data from 47 ETS/lung cancer studies. Using weighted estimates, the risk increase was 5.5% (95% Cl 0 to +11 %). Restricting attention to the 36 studies that had adjusted for age, the increase was reduced further to -2% (95% Cl -6 to+3%) using un-weighted estimates, or to + 1 % (95% Cl -4 to +6%) using weighted estimates. These estimates are not materially affected by bias due to the reference group (non-smokers married to non-smokers) having some ETS exposure from other sources. Other sources of potential upward and downward bias, not formally taken account of in the analysis, are discussed. Based on extrapolation from the known lung cancer risk in smok ers, Hackshaw et al. [Br Med J 1997;315:980-988] esti mate that environmental tobacco smoke exposure would be expected to increase the risk of lung cancer in non-smokers by 19%. Using more appropriate assump tions (for the relative exposure to smoke constituents of passive and active smokers, for the lung cancer risk in those who have ever smoked and for the dose-response model) leads to a much lower estimate of about 0.5%. Even this estimate is open to question as a threshold might exist for the effects of tobacco smoke constituents on lung cancer risk. Whether or not a true risk exists, it is clear that this is not demonstrated by the overall evi dence. The true increase in risk per 10 cigarettes/day smoked by the husband is very unlikely to be as large as 23%. It might be as much as 5%, but it could well be 1 % or less, or even zero.

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  96. Hmm it appears passive smoking maybe protective. It says so in SCOTH.

    "Restricting attention to the 36 studies that had adjusted for age, the increase was reduced further to -2% (95% Cl -6 to+3%)"

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  97. Rich White: sorry, but I can't subscribe to your argument. I believe you're wrong when you're saying that you can't prove that something is harmless, and I believe you're also wrong when you say that it's in the tobacco industry interest to have secondhand smoke believed to be harmfull.
    Here are the reasons :

    -- about the impossibility to prove it's not harmfull --
    0 - It is of course possible to prove that something DON'T do something else. Your example of a flying saucer is a good one, because if you say that a teapot is flying, you have to PROVE it, by either showing evidences of the fact or describing the circonstances where will see it. If you can't show evidences, and if reproducing the circonstances don't show it, then it's not science, it's faith. It's something totally different. In science, a lot of experiements prove that something DON'T have effect on something else, for example that giving antibiotics DON'T do anything to viruses.
    So it is possible to prove that something IS NOT harmfull.
    1 - It's really fortunate that in science this is possible, because in the REACH directive, about chemical products, now the proof about risk is opposed. Before, it was the state that had to prove that the product is dangerous to ban it. Now, it's the industrial that should proove that the product is harmfull.
    So if it wasn't possible, then it will soon be the end of all chemical products in the EU. I won't catch my breath for it ! :)
    2 - Moreover, the studies done by the tobacco industries SHOWS risks and results. It's not only a rhetorical question, would it be possible to find a study that show that it's NOT harmfull. It's a conclusion about reality, that is that ALL studies done are SHOWING that there are risks.

    -- about the idea that it's the tobacco industries interest to have secondhand smoke believed to be harmfull, even if it's not true --
    0 - first, the idea of imiting the risk is just ridiculous, because if true it would not apply only to tobacco industries, but to all industries. Meaning that it would be in the financial and global interest of any industries to make people believe that their products are dangerous so that they won't be sued. Of course, anyone can realize that it's not, fortunately.
    1 - there's another problem with this idea, that is the difference between the public and the internal discours of tobacco industries. Almost all tobacco industries still deny in public that second hand smoke is a risk. The acknowledgment of the risk is only in INTERNAL speach, a speach that WASN'T AT ALL planned to be public, but that was FORCED to be public by judges.
    If your idea was right, then it would be the opposite that would be true: a public speach talking about risks, so that if sued the industry can say "hey, we DID tell you", but in internal a speach that would say that no, in fact, it isn't dangerous. With the current situation, the industries are NOT protected from a lawsuit, ON THE OPPOSITE, someone can sue them for lying about secondhand smoke when always knowing the thrue.
    2 - still about the difference between public and private speach, if your idea was right, the internal speach would say that in fact there is no risk, but that it would be good for the public to believe otherwise in case of a lawsuit, where the company would then be able to say : we told you. But in the reality, it's the opposite: internal documentations and directives explains that secondhand smoke is the BIGGEST problem of tobacco industries and that ALL should be done to deny it and cast doubt about it.
    3 - why wanting to protect themselves for lawsuit if secondhand smoke is NOT dangerous ? Especially since they have done so many studies about it ?
    4 - Warning on packets even where it's not forced is comprehensible as they have PUBLICLY aknowledged that yes, it is a proven fact, smoking IS dangerous. So there's a real danger of being sued, when you publicly aknowledge that your product is dangerous. However, I still have to see a tobacco industrial adknowledge publicly that secondhand smoke is dangerous, or even propose to put warning about secondhand smoke on packets !
    5 - why do believe what the tobacco industy say ? Because they deny it publicly, but their internal documentation, that they have NO CHOICE to make public, say the opposite. What do you believe ? What they say publicly or what they say internally and don't want public to know ?


    So really, if we use Ockham rasor criteria here, you're argument could not be considered valid, sorry. There is really NO logical interest for tobacco industries to publicly deny secondhand smoke but for internally admit it's dangerous. There are lots of studies made internally by tobacco industries that show that secondhand smoke is a risk. All internal documentation, that was FORCED to be made public, show that secondhand smoke is a really problem for tobacco industries, because they KNOW that it's a risk. And if even the tobacco industrie know it, even if they don't want to admit it publicly, then...

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  98. kyegl,
    1) Nice argument, but it's irrelevant. Suppose I get cancer, can it be proven smoking wasn't the cause? No. Certain things can be proven, like the fact that my television doesn't walk upstairs at night. But we must compare apples with apples. If i go outside with wet hair and catch a cold, can it be proven the wet hair did NOT cause it? No, but it can be proven that the cold virus caused it.

    2) By no means do all studies on SHS purport a risk. Christ, just look around this page a bit and you'll see how grossly inaccurate that statement is. Most, if not all studies, when adjusted properly, show no significant risk. The OFFICIAL line is a relative risk of 1.18 - which is, scientifically speaking, irrelevant.

    3) It's not in the best interest of all industries at all, because not all industries are under constant attack and other industries haven't had their products slammed for causing cancer yet. Big Tobacco denied it for a long time but with the ongoing lawsuits realised it was in their best interest to say 'ok, fine, theres a risk, now you're aware of the risk and decided to smoke anyway, that's not our fault'

    4) Actually tobacco companies openly admit the risk of smoking. don't believe me? Just wander over to one of their sites and see plastered all over it 'smoking kills' 'we support stop smoking programs' and so forth. I've seen people from Philip Morris on the news saying how smoking is good for society because it kills people at a younger age.

    5) SHS warnings? Erm "smoking seriously harms you and others around you" "protect children: don't make them breathe your smoke"

    6) are you familiar with the Master Settlement Agreement? There are NO hidden tobacco industry documents. And you know what? There's nothing in those documents that damns the tobacco industry. If there was, it'd be all over the news how they use this tactic and that tactic and hide this and hide that - but there's no reports of that.

    SHS is not a risk. Hey, believe what you want about what the tobacco industry is hiding and then made public and it shows without doubt any risk - go straight to the ANTI-smoking corner, who openly say 'look at our study which shows SHS kills' and then see that, actually, using their own results we can see SHS is not a killer. Just look at the posts on SCOTH above your post as a perfect example

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  99. Rich White:
    1 - on YOUR case, no, it can't be proven that it's the wet hair that bring you the cold. But can it be proven , on a big enough scale, that wet cold is bringing, with a probability, cold ? Yes, of course !
    Is it the fact that there is probability in the equation that you find non-scientifical ? Then all science about human (psychology, socialogy) is not a science for you ? And what about quantum physics, which is ALL about probability ?
    So YES, it can be proven that something DON'T have any effect, even on medical studies.

    2 - I was speaking of the tobacco industries OWN internal studies, not public ones.

    3 - yes, sure, pharmaceutical and chemical industries are not at all under public scutiny, and really so much none of their product had been proven dangerous that even films had be made of them...
    Asbestos, someone ?
    And what about food industries ? Really, no public scrutiny about their health effect, sure...
    Come on !

    4 - you're talking about smoking, not secondhand smoke. I totally agree that they admit smoking as a risk, it was even one of my point ! But still haven't see a tobacco industry admit PUBLICLY that PASSIVE smoking (or second hand smoke) is a risk...

    5 - read again my sentence : "I still have to see a tobacco industrial adknowledge publicly that secondhand smoke is dangerous, or even propose to put warning about secondhand smoke on packets !"
    Citing state-forced warning doesn't really count as "tobacco-industries proposed" warning, don't you agree ?

    6 - yeah, sure, all the documents made public on http://www.pmdocs.com/ were meant to be made public and it wasn't at all the judges that force them to be made public !
    LIke the email and internal memos of Microsoft saying that "Vista home" is not really vista were absolutely made to be public, and the fact that it's the judge that revealed them is for nothing in it !
    And it was SO made to be public that they decided to have laywers fighting for some documents NOT to be made public:
    http://www.pmdocs.com/ppubpriv.asp
    Really ! You can come with better argument than that !

    "it will be all over the news..." YES, it was ! How they lied, and how they internal document prove the opposite ! It was such a mess when they started to make all documents public.
    And the summary of the judge, on ALTRIA site, is really about this:
    http://www.altria.com/download/pdf/media_doj_08172006_final_opinion.pdf

    Again, it's easy to discredit studies done by others, based on their financing, their supposed or proved lobbying, or to try to arg about science arguments without being yourself a scientist.
    It's also really easy to call "common sense" arguments to fakely prove a scientific fact false (talk about a round earth when we can see it flat, that earth is rotating when we can see that it's the sun that's moving, that time is not constant when the clock are the same, that a particule can be on 2 places at the same time in quantic and so on...).
    And it's much harder to see the truth in all this, if you're not a good scientist in the domain (and even if you are), because both sides can really be right, if you can't debug the true from the false.

    But Ockham rasor is a good helper in those case. You can explains why WHO resusts are true or are false, and you can explain why WHO is lobbyed or why second-hand denying speaches are lobbyed.
    But how can you explains results of internal studies and internal positions of tobacco industries if there is NO risk in passive smoking ?
    You can't.

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  100. Would Rollo please reveal his identity or if anyone out there knows who he is, please can they tell me. He often joins in these debates. Perhaps he could address the question I ask all anti-smokers. I have never received even a serious attempt at an answer.
    What is is your objection to a group of smokers getting together and forming a smokers' club, staffed entirely by the members?

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  101. Jonathan the reason is they know such venues would be all too popular as the German delegate said.

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  102. Carlos, Mystery Man Rollo is obviously intelligent and has studied this this subject in depth (I'm being genuine). If he considers himself a scholar, rather than a PR man or campaigner, he should be able to come up with something a little better.

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  103. Kylegl:
    1) Please don't do what Rollo does and misinterpret something, form a hypothesis from that then use said hypothesis to accuse me of something. Now, going back to the cold/wet hair argument you've got it the wrong way round: if wet hair caused a cold it can be proven, YES. But wet hair does NOT cause colds, the cold is a virus. Ergo, if i go out with wet hair and get a cold, that's coincidence (with today's knowledge i mean. If a substantial amount of people went out and got colds with wet hair then we would have a positive statistical correlation that could hint at causation. But we are privileged enough to know that wet hair doesn't cause a cold, hence my analogy). But the fact is that data purporting to show SHS DOES cause harm actually routinely shows the exact opposite - no harm, and a possible protective effect.

    2) If they're not public and only the tobacco industry's internal ones, how, exactly, do you know what they say? I'll temporarily overlook the fact that under the freedom of information act there is nothing the tobacco industries are allowed to hide.

    3) That's not what i said about other industries though is it? No. You raised pharmaceutical companies - good. Open the box on ANY pharmaceutical product and what will you see? A list of possible side effects from taking the drugs. THAT protects them. Now people can't take them, turn yellow and sue the companies

    4) I've not heard a tobacco spokesman publicly asked about SHS, but again if you go to their site you will see that they do very much openly speak of the dangers of SHS. To save you time here's a link to Philip Morris' passive smoke section http://www.philipmorrisinternational.com/PMINTL/pages/eng/smoking/Secondhand_smoke.asp

    "Philip Morris International believes that the conclusions of public health officials concerning environmental tobacco smoke are sufficient to warrant measures that regulate smoking in public places. We also believe that where smoking is permitted, the government should require the posting of warning notices that communicate public health officials' conclusions that secondhand smoke causes disease in non-smokers."

    5) Read my earlier comment again: in countries where they are not required to do so, tobacco companies place warnings on their packets. Whether this includes SHS i do not know, but i can't see them refraining from doing so because it's hardly keeping people in the dark

    6) You're right, there were documents the tobacco industry wanted to be kept out of the public - but rather than assuming these were because they were so damaging with regards to health consequences, why not take the time to find out? The tobacco companies didn't want their ingredients for each cigarette being known, and understandably so. Marlboro is the biggest brand in the world, would PM be happy that a new brand could replicate the flavour at a fraction of the cost? These documents being withheld from us doesn't mean only the industry can see them, they're still required to show them to the health officials who know EXACTLY what is in cigarettes and their studies. The bottom line is, besides all the fuss and trash thrown around, there is nothing they have on the tobacco companies to damage them. Nothing. There's nothing in cigarettes that isn't found in food and drinks.

    7) I don't have the time to read a 1680 page document, is there a specific part i'm meant to be looking at? I noticed instantly how ALL the prosecution are funded anti-smoking organisations. Are you trying to convince me that the tobacco organisation has proven SHS is deadly because anti-smoking organisations have said so? Tell me, if they have access to these studies and they're so damaging, why are they not releasing them themselves instead of relying on their own flimsy, weak and discredited rubbish?

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  104. Jonathan problem is he hasnt done any research at all and hes only copying and pasting from anti studies.

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  105. 1 and 2:
    They are NOT public in the sense that they were NOT published in scientific reviews or things like that when they were made. Why ? Because the tobacco industries DIDN'T want to publish them.
    HOWEVER, they are NOW of public access, and you CAN access them from the site http://www.pmdocs.com/
    And all the studies you will find on THIS site and that haven't be "published" found that SHS IS dangerous.

    3: yes, they're talking about POSSIBLE side effects, mainly side effect that somehow either HAD happens in a few case or are SUSCEPTIBLE to happens in a few case. But you WONT find a list of EVERY AND ALL possible side effect that you could find on earth ! They will limit to those that they THINK could happens ! Again, your example is perfect : you WON'T find a drug saying that a potential effect could be that you turn to yellow (or whatever color by the way), NOR that a potential effect could be CANCER !
    So really hard to believe that some company could speak about a side effect that she think don't have ANY chance of happening.

    4: yes, a really big assessment about SHS from Philip Morris, indeed ! They believe that gvt have reasons to put ban, and that "public health officials" conclusion is that SHS is dangerous ! Not Philip Morris, "public health officials" !!!
    And that the ONLY tobacco industrial to say something that's just approaching of an acknowledgment, all others are in full deny !
    Example :
    http://www.imperial-tobacco.com/files/environment/cr2007/index.asp?pageid=23&show=resources
    "Although we do not accept that ETS is harmful to health, we acknowledge the concerns that some non-smokers have and accept that it is desirable to eliminate involuntary exposure to tobacco smoke."

    Maybe the phrasing of Philip Morris has something to do with the fact that their internal documents where put in public and that they had the more internal documentations and studies about SHS ?

    Whatever the case, this really isn't a full-public assessment of SHS dangerousitiy, compared to what is said in internal documents, so you still can't explain the difference between your scenario (where they would say publicly it's dangerous and internally that isn't) and the reality (where it's the opposite). If you were right, there SHOULD be a public acknolegment.

    And if you never heard a tobacco spokesman publicly asked about SHS, then 1 - you should document yourself better, and 2 - just try to ask them yourself.

    5 - yes, even where they are not forced, they put warning, but ONLY about the danger of ACTIVE SMOKING ! I defy you to find a place where SHS warning will have been put directly by the tobacco industries and NOT forced by the gvt.

    I see you really have trouble to see that SHS IS a major problem for tobacco industries, and I think you're sincere.
    I recommand you to read thoses documents, maybe they will enlight you:
    http://tobaccodocuments.org/landman/976657.html
    http://www.pmdocs.com/PDF/2023329411_9457_0.PDF
    http://www.pmdocs.com/PDF/2023551401_1404_0.PDF

    6 - why not YOU take the time to find out what they are ? Because really, saying what you're saying, that they're only about their ingredients, that they are not secrets, and that there's nothing in it damaging for the tobacco industries, really, prove that you didn't look at all of what you're talking about.

    So, some links to enlight you:
    The MAIN page with links to all sites :
    http://tobacco.neu.edu/litigation/resources/who.html
    One interesting :
    http://tobaccodocuments.org/
    The one specific to Philip Morris :
    http://www.pmdocs.com/

    If you want to get to the good part, see next answer.

    7 - I put the indication of the good part in a precedent message, you seems to have missed it, so here it is again:
    "A big summary of all that can be found on a document that is DIRECTLY on the web site of Altria, company owner of Philip Morris:
    http://www.altria.com/download/pdf/media_doj_08172006_final_opinion.pdf
    (page 1239: "Internally, Defendants Recognized that ETS Is Hazardous to Nonsmokers")"

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  106. Rollo,

    If you come here pretending to know what you are talking about, I will continue to take the mickey out of you because you are as thick as two short planks.

    Nice try at twisting the argument by asking me to teach you maths to prove I am right. You could try a first year OU maths course. All of your blinding errors are amply covered in the basics and I understand it's very affordable. In the meantime there are several good books at Amazon, you could start with LLN theorem, it explains perfectly why you talk from the wrong end of your body.

    Now do you want to tell me again why "larger" studies carry more weight? lol. How large does the study have to be Rollo? 75 000? 100 000?

    What does it mean Rollo if the result is different when you increase the sample size? No need to check the anti smoking bible, I gave you the answer to this one already ;)

    If you take one study that asks the relatives of dead people how much passive smoke the deceased inhaled in 1975 and another study that measures passive smoke exposure over 3 months by measuring cotinine levels; how do you add those two studies together? Is it now scientific to compare apples with oranges to calculate lemons? (I mean in real science not in fascist land)

    I continue to ask you questions because I know the answers and you don't lol, which is why you can't answer them, in fact you have to ask me to teach you lolololol. You are driven purely by fascist hatred of a habit you can't understand and seek to control.

    I didn't misquote Angell; multiple studies make no difference because none of them use the same methodology to gain a repeatable result (don't ask me to explain, just Google it) and all are flawed by the unmeasurable dosages and the myriad of confounders that are routinely ignored. Why did you bring it up? Didn't you realise that you can't add dissimilar studies together like counting sheep or are you just used to talking to people who are more stupid than you are?

    As for the obligatory Nazi references, the defining Nazi image for me is how they forced thousand upon thousand of innocent people to die each year through exposure to lethal gases, and all the while they denied this was happening. Much like fascist anti smokers claim that millions of smokers are dying but at the same time have blocked safe cigarettes for the past 30 years.

    Nazi scum never change huh Rollie?

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  107. kylegl,

    The Tobacco Document Depository contains 35 million pages and I don't have the inclination (or time) to read them all because the tobacco industry is at the other extreme from the fascist anti scumbags.

    Besides that; the direct links you provided are not studies they are reports and they don't state any of the things you claim.

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  108. __steve__ :
    Yes sure. But then, if they are so many documents, how do you know that:
    - they are NOT secrets
    - NOTHING is damaging in them
    - they are ONLY about ingredients
    - they are ONLY about reports
    - they are NO studies at all ?

    Sorry, but you really don't have to read them all.
    Just the "Internally, Defendants Recognized that ETS Is Hazardous to Nonsmokers", page 1239, of the following link:
    http://www.altria.com/download/pdf/media_doj_08172006_final_opinion.pdf

    This is a summary of most important ones. And YES, some of them are reports and some of them are STUDIES.
    Everyone reading this section of this document can see that.

    Is that the only point you have? Denying the documents? Really ?

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  109. Kylegl:

    1) So show me a study that is apparently so groundbreaking...

    2) Possible side effects....are you suggesting that cancer is a definite effect of smoking? Bearing in mind that a small minority (10-15%) of smokers actually go on to develop the disease. The comparison stands: cigarettes contain warnings to protect the industry, as do pharmaceutical drugs. Oh and cancer, MANY drugs have been linked to cancer, including the widely used and often touted as safe contraceptive pill

    3) Ok let's go with your idea that ONLY PM acknowledge a danger of SHS - so what? I don't blame them. You see, unlike active smoking with no reported health risks an individual can't sue the industry for passive smoking. Who can they blame? There's no way of knowing for sure SHS causes cancer, because there's no way of measuring exposure. The tobacco industry knows that. And they may reject the idea SHS is harmful, they still accept restrictions on smoking.

    4) You 'defy' me? Well why don't you run along and go find out what warnings exist in each country that isn't mandated? It doesn't matter what they choose to put, because a smoker can't be responsible for a non-smoker standing next to them. Do you want third hand smoke warnings too?

    5)The 'big summary' of almost 1700 words is absolutely laughable. It is 100% anti-smoking doctrine, in a case brought by funded anti-smoking organisations. It was used as part of the MSA. Again, the 'evidence' does not hold up - if it did, it would be splashed everywhere and no one would be able to deny it. Instead, we're given SCOTH and the WHO report which are frankly embarassing to the anti-smoking brigade.

    You provide me with links, but don't specify what i should be looking at to 'enlight' myself. Have you read them? If so, why can't you direct me to a specific item that is supporting your argument?

    Here's some facts for you:

    1) the minority of smokers get cancer
    2) 60% of smokers live beyond the life expectancy
    3) No animal study has successfully induced lung cancer in animals, as conceded by the plaintiff in the Minnessota vs tobacco 1997 court case. They are now resorting to using specially bred rats born to be susceptible to cancer to blame on smoking
    4) There is not one single ingredient in cigarettes that you're not exposed to elsewhere. For instance, there's more benzene in a glass of tap water than a cigarette. There's ammonia and polonium 210 in soil and fertilisers which we then ingest from any food grown in the ground
    5) The countries with the highest smoking rates have the lowest rates of lung cancer, such as Japan, Greece and Iceland. The countries with the lowest smoking rates have higher lung cancer rates, such as the UK and America
    6) All the studies have been discredited by independent researchers like Burch, Fischer, Eysenck etc. Conversely, the anti's were paid heavily to find their results, like Doll being on £1000 a day from Monsanto as well as other chemical companies. Today Big Pharma pours billions into anti-smoking studies. Tobacco control is a huge, well financed movement that knows what the results will be before they're found.
    7) Despite what you think, SHS is not considered a health risk to real scientists. Tout a 25% increase if you want (but look up this page and see how even SCOTH shows a risk of less than 1%) but that translates to a relative risk of 1.25. The official line is a RR of 1.18. To be considered a health threat a RR needs to be at LEAST 3. And incidentally, the RR of passive smoke is lower than incense, wearing a bra or keeping a pet bird.

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  110. I've read that page 1239 and, uh, what? It's so unconvincing. You see, it says one thing and you've interpreted it as something else. Here's what you're saying: BT has admitted SHS is harmful. Here's what is really said:

    Carcinogens from active smoke are present in passive smoke. 84% of smoke is sidestream (passive)smoke. You can't put that together to say that SHS is harmful, because what is the dose?

    Further down the page two scientists say that the paper is flawless and non-smokers have airway damage. Have you read their paper? I haven't, and it doesn't have any excerpts. Hmm, why? Given that we STILL can't measure dosage or toxicity of SHS, what were they doing to find out? It also speaks of 'chronic' exposure - what defines chronic? Certainly not an hour in a smoky pub that's for sure. Over the years there have been tobacco industry workers who succumb to the anti's and speak out against BT. One scientist left PM because they used ammonia - yet ammonia is found in a lot of foods. It's not a substantial argument. Again, we must think of dosage. The flavourings in a pack of marlboro reds (20 cigarettes) make up 0.7mg - less than a thousandth of a gram.

    Let's assume 84% of smoke is passive - not all of that is inhaled. In fact, a very small percent is inhaled, and it is very dilute.

    You're using a weak, and in all honesty an unsupported, quote from a tobacco scientist yet there's no EVIDENCE, or METHODOLOGY! What did they do to find out the dosage? What did they do to study non-smokers airways? What variables were there such as living in a city or village? WE DO NOT KNOW! So you can't go running around saying 'look look look the tobacco industry knew all along'. They didn't.

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  111. @kylegl
    kylegl noted
    "7 - (page 1239: "Internally, Defendants Recognized that ETS Is Hazardous to Nonsmokers")"

    The opinion is subject to appeal. In the appeal brief we find (pg 103/4)

    "Although the district court referred to defendants' supposed "internal
    acknowledgment of the hazards of secondhandsmoke," [Op.-1 5231, the only type
    of acknowledgment" entified was that ETS contains substances that could be
    carcinogenic or toxic and that a few published studies had found a weak statistical
    correlation between spousal smoking and lung cancer. [Op. - 1239-581. The

    Surgeon General and public health scientists were well aware of these facts, see,
    e.g., [Op. - 12 15-30], but also had not concluded that ETS exposure causes disease."

    Carvin at the appeal hearing (Oct 2008) said
    "She [Judge Kessler] cites not one example where anybody [refering to the tobacco companies] said, “We DO think ETS causes disease.”"

    It is necessary to hear both sides before quoting in this manner. It would seem that BigT dispute the finding of Judge Kessler and that there will be a further ruling by the appeal court.

    It is simple to say 'they would say that, wouldn't they' yet this is where evidence comes into play. If Carvin is right about Kessler then there would appear to be no evidence.

    west
    ----

    ReplyDelete
  112. True West, the whole report Kylegl is using as the holy grail was in fact appealed

    ReplyDelete
  113. Yes bit likr the Osteen report regarding the 1993 EPA Report.

    ReplyDelete
  114. kylegl said...

    " __steve__ :
    Yes sure. But then, if they are so many documents, how do you know that:
    - they are NOT secrets
    - NOTHING is damaging in them
    - they are ONLY about ingredients
    - they are ONLY about reports
    - they are NO studies at all ?"

    I don't and I never claimed I did and your non argument can simply be turned around on you. - If there are so many documents how do YOU know the opposite?

    The page and link you provided at: http://www.altria.com/download/pdf/media_doj_08172006_final_opinion.pdf
    is a statement from 6 Nazi anti smoking groups who are attacking Philip Morris. Again it doesn't say anything like the things you claim and in any case I wouldn't trust Philip Morris any more than I would trust the scum that are attacking them. It's like telling me to believe the Waffen SS if they attacked the Gestapo. (Rollo can explain those groups to you)

    Where did I "deny the documents?", I actually said I don't have the inclination to read the 35 million pages on the link you gave us. Call me impolite but it's a bit of a stretch to expect me to do so on a Thursday evening. I know - I could read say 10 a night and catch up with you when I'm done, in about nine and a half thousand years; where will you be?

    The other links you provided were not "tobacco industry studies that admit SHS harm" as you claimed. They were in fact reports that said nothing of the sort.

    Your arguments exist only in your head, they don't make any sense.

    ReplyDelete
  115. 1 - whole thing about warning : NO public warning or NO public acknowledgment of SHS dangerosity -> NO interest for tobacco industries to say that SHS is dangerous, contrary to your point

    2 - summary: it's NOT a "statement" by "anti-smoking" organisations. It's the opinion of a judge, BASED (with QUOTATION as proof) on the internal documentation available from tobacco industries (yes, BigT are STILL pursuing battle in justice not to made public some 100 000 documents, see here: http://www.pmdocs.com/ppubpriv.asp)

    As it was made on 2006, and is using the documents made public during the MSA, I don't think it has been used in the MSA...

    So all the "evidences" that are quoted in it, be it reports or studies, are in fact INTERNAL DOCUMENTS from the tobacco industries. If you can't access the details of them, ask to BigT !

    Some extracts :
    In a January 26, 1982 letter to Tom
    Osdene in Richmond, Rylander reported the following:
    "Last week I visited with INBIFO. The results from the first side
    stream smoke experiment are available and confirm the previous
    observation that this smoke on equal TPM is more irritating and/or
    toxic. The histology demonstrates more advanced lesions in the nasal
    epithelium and hyper and metaplasia in areas which are not affected
    by main stream smoke. The extent of cornification observed in these
    animals has never been seen before. ""

    [...]

    10/18/82 Tumorogenicity study of
    mainstream and sidestream
    smoke condensate on mice.
    "Sidestream condensate showed a 2-
    to 6-fold higher tumorigenicity than
    mainstream condensate."

    [...]

    Philip Morris also knew that sidestream smoke effects were produced at very low
    concentrations. A 1994 written "short survey" of INBIFO ETS-related inhalation studies research,
    sent from INBIFO to Philip Morris, stated that INBIFO inhalation research showed:
    "In general, the biological activity of SS (e.g., respiratory tract irritancy
    and mouse skin tumorigenicity as well as in vitro cytotoxicity,
    mutagenicity, and clastogenicity) has been found to match or to
    slightly exceed that of mainstream smoke. . . ."

    [...]

    In a February, 1994 presentation by Franz Adlkofer, director of VdC (Verband, or
    German manufacturers association) to an industry sidestream smoke meeting attended by
    representatives of Philip Morris, Reynolds, and BATCo, he said that his ninety-day study finding
    both dysplasia and metaplasia in exposed rats was not permitted to be extended to a longer-term
    study: "Dr. Adlkofer then told us that he wanted to do a two-year study in rats, but the industry
    would not support the study because they were afraid of the results."

    [...]

    Similarly, B&W recognized the scientific evidence demonstrating that passive
    smoking is harmful to nonsmokers. In a November 16, 1982 memorandum from B&W in-house
    counsel Bob Sachs to company scientists and lawyers, Sachs questioned the role of the Tobacco
    Institute in affecting the "public smoking" issue given "the overwhelming weight of scientific
    literature pointing toward [the] toxicity" of tobacco smoke.

    [...]

    The 1990 Spitzer study funded by Reynolds concluded that "[t]he weight of the
    evidence is compatible with a positive association between residential exposure to environmental
    tobacco smoke (primarily from spousal smoking) and the risk of lung cancer." The study also found
    links between passive smoking and respiratory illness and reduced lung function in both adults and
    children, as well as childhood hospitalization and asthma in children. 515251440-1465 at 1441 (US
    92103).

    [...]

    On July 6, 1994, the Majority Staff of the Health and Environment Subcommittee of
    the Committee on Energy and Commerce in the United States House of Representatives sent
    members of Defendants' CIAR Science Advisory Board (SAB) a survey on the health effects of
    passive smoking. Six of the seven SAB members who responded agreed that ETS "presents a
    serious and substantial public health threat to children" and five of the seven members agreed that
    ETS is "a human lung carcinogen."

    etc.

    Again, all this are either direct quotation or explanation of INTERNAL DOCUMENTATION of BigT, not something "made up" by anti-smoking organisation...


    So, yes, it has been appealed.
    Let's wait to see what the appeal result will be.
    And let's wait what the result of asking for ALL documents to be disclosed will be also...

    ReplyDelete
  116. David: The estimate of 11,000 passive-smoking related deaths in the UK each year comes from a report published in the BMJ in 2005 by Konrad Jamrozik. It is based on established evidence and Relative Risk factors.

    Fredrik: You claim SCOTH needs to be independent again, but you have no grounds for showing that it is acting less than independently already. As I have said already, its conclusions mirror those reached by other prominent researchers and groups. Having Lord Nimmo Smith on the Committee would not make a difference, I am sure. In the McTear case, he had to reach a decision based on the evidence offered to him by the competing parties. As a judge in a court of law in Scotland, he is not allowed to conduct his own investigations. Even his ability to ask clarifying questions is extremely limited. Committee members have much broader powers to conduct investigations. So, if he was a member of SCOTH and uncertain about a position, he could simply ask for further information or evidence before reaching his view.

    ReplyDelete
  117. Rich White: Please show me where Doll and Wynder “conceded that they were wrong about smoking/cancer”.

    As for your comments on SCOTH:

    1. Rich – you’re havering. SCOTH stands for “Scientific Committee on Tobacco and Health”.

    2. You’re making a baseless claim that SCOTH produced the Government’s own report. It’s also wrong. After all, if it really was “produced simply to be used as a tool to make smokefree laws” as you claim, those smokefree laws should have been introduced following the 1998 report.

    3. I don’t understand your point about the SCOTH report not containing new science. It was entirely appropriate that SCOTH advise the Chief Medical Officer and Government, based on a synthesis of extensive pre-existing evidence. You’re not the first person on this blog to accuse SCOTH of cherry-picking studies to review. Only, nobody has said which important studies were supposedly ignored. Can you?

    4. I think you’re confusing 2 separate reports. SCOTH 1998 looked at smoking as well as passive smoking. SCOTH 2004 concentrated on passive smoking.

    5. I find your remarks here disturbing. It’s as if you’re trying to say we should not be concerned about the lifespans of older people. Besides, smoking has held down average UK life expectancy, smoking-related diseases can inflict misery on sufferers for months and years prior to death.

    6. I’ve found virtually word-for-word comments on the Forces website. Have you actually investigated this for yourself? Or have you just copied and pasted something you thought might help your argument? Besides, what makes Simon Chapman’s comments on the report so important that they should over-ride what the Council as a whole concluded?

    7. You’re claiming smoking may have beneficial effects. I’ve read about this too. Some of them might even be true. BUT: Only the smoker would enjoy these supposedly beneficial effects. Where is the benefit for the people around inhaling their secondhand smoke?

    As for your 11:46 comment, you seem to be making ad hominem attacks on Doll and Bradford-Hill, not commenting on the quality of their reports. And – guess what! – more misquoting!!! You are trying to suggest he wanted to invent a conclusion. In fact, all he wanted to do was demonstrate what he had already discovered from an earlier study in a large piece of work which nobody could ignore.

    ReplyDelete
  118. DaveA: Thank you for the pleasant words. I’m fine and hope you are too. Have fun with your task of going through the 71 papers! But I think SCOTH have it right in their statement at page 5. They’re acknowledging that most of the studies do not achieve statistical significance as individual studies. But they should not be looked at individually – they should be looked at as a collective body of evidence. As I’ve said above, pro-smoking groups take the view that studies should be measured according to whether they are statistically significant individually. But that’s a hard and fast rule which I have never come across from an independent expert. I’ve asked people to point me to professional literature which shows the pro-smokers’ approach to be right. But nobody has replied.

    You also highlight material by PN Lee, which is referred to in the SCOTH report (further proof, incidentally, that SCOTH did not cherry-pick their evidence). SCOTH stress that Lee’s claims are put in perspective by empirical investigations which show the effects of misclassification to be minor. On top of that, the likes of Hackshaw & Wald and Boffetta have strongly refuted Lee’s claims (e.g. http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/317/7154/346?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=1&title=smoke&andorexacttitle=and&andorexacttitleabs=and&andorexactfulltext=and&searchid=1106868160261_22326&stored_search=&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&resourcetype=1,2,3,4; http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/91/6/560).

    ReplyDelete
  119. Jonathan Bagley: I don’t have an objection to a group of smokers getting together and forming a smokers’ club. They can do it in someone’s home. That is private property, after all. Obviously it would be BYOB. They couldn’t sell alcohol – that would require a license.

    ReplyDelete
  120. I see Steve’s approach is to try to avoid issues by laying on the insults thickly. Charming. I’ll stick to the issues, though.

    You are trying to claim that a whole catalogue of epidemiological studies should be assessed in complete isolation of each other, against a rigid 95% CI and with no opportunity for corroborating evidence. Well that is absolutely bogus science.

    Larger studies carrying more weight is obvious. Although meta-analyses include other adjustments, their starting point is the number of case subjects. So, in general terms, the weight of a study in the final meta-analysis increases proportionately the more case subjects it includes.

    You are living in some deluded theoretical dreamworld if you think meta-analyses can only apply to studies with completely homogeneous methodologies. The studies that are included in meta-analyses have been published and are robust in their own right. Yes, confounders can exist. Guess what? They’re taken into account.

    You lied when you misquoted Marcia Angell. Now you try to defend your claim by saying “multiple studies make no difference because none of them use the same methodology to gain a repeatable result”. But her quote had nothing to do with this. Let me allow you to be hoist by your own petard. Marcia Angell, whom you claim would not accept meta-analyses, was editing at the NEJM when it published the He et al meta-analysis into passive smoking and heart disease in 1999.
    And George Davey Smith, who has been cautious about the risks of passive smoking and who wrote a detailed series of articles on meta-analyses in the BMJ, is also clear that he has not problem in principle with the use of meta-analyses in relation to passive smoking (if you read his BMJ editorial following the Enstrom & Kabat report).

    I’m not sure who you mean by “anti-smoker”. I see Gian Turci apparently said at this conference: "There are two types of anti-smoker. The ones who don't want it banned as they want their paycheck, and the ones like some over [at the EU] who do because "I hate it, hate it, hate it, and don't want others to do it". Guess what? I don’t fall into either category. So I am no anti-smoker.

    ReplyDelete
  121. Rollo, you are something of a marvel of nature aren't you? I see you twisting the words of Doll to suit yourself, and have the audacity to accuse us of misquoting - oh sweet irony. The smoke free laws would not be made straight after the report, they take time. And why are you suddenly switching between reports anyway?

    "I find your remarks here disturbing. It’s as if you’re trying to say we should not be concerned about the lifespans of older people. Besides, smoking has held down average UK life expectancy, smoking-related diseases can inflict misery on sufferers for months and years prior to death."
    Are you stupid? Let me repeat it: middle age, in the report, goes well into OLD age. I didn't say we shouldn't be concerned with old people, but they must be categorised appropriately - how can 74 be the life expectancy, and old age start at 70? That is what the report purports by claiming middle age is 39-69.

    What's your point about the health benefits? Because non-smokers don't get benefits it must be banned? Interesting.... Oh, by the way, as has been said a few times on here already with the relevant evidence that you love to ignore, non-smokers do appear to have a statistically significant decrease in lung cancer when exposed to SHS. Oops....

    "They’re acknowledging that most of the studies do not achieve statistical significance as individual studies. But they should not be looked at individually – they should be looked at as a collective body of evidence."

    What utter bunk! You cannot lump studies together how you see fit, if they have different samples, different methodologies etc then they can't just be slotted together. That is statistical manipulation and i'm sure you know it. If the studies show no risk individually, then that is the bottom line. If one study showed SHS was harmful, would you dismiss it because it's not relevant alone? Of course not.

    By the way, a pub is private property - not public.

    And, you know what, you consistently ignore something raised time and time again: you spout about an increased risk over and over, but that 'risk' is, officially, 1.18. Even with your claim of a 25% increased risk we're looking at 1.25 - which is TINY, and not considered by real researchers to be a risk at all.

    ReplyDelete
  122. Sorry Rollo, didn't see you asking for Doll and Wynder's confessions. Wynder's was done over time, if you know anything of his work then you'll know that - if you don't, this isn't the place to educate you. If you DO know about Wynder, you will know that what he claimed is the exact opposite to the information in his own graphs....

    Doll, in addition to the aforementioned quote on Bradford Hill which you have unsuccessfully twisted to your own needs, said:

    “It does look as if it’s the cancers that are principally caused by hormones that are not affected by smoking. Most of the other cancers throughout the body are induced by exposure to chemicals, often environmental ones”

    ReplyDelete
  123. Kylegl, i can tell from your excerpts that you are not familiar with tricky language. One example is how mice have matched or higher tumours with SHS condensate as mainstream smoke condensate. This is NOT 'smoke'. Condensate will cause skin cancers on any nude mouse, as will any irritant. Condensate is not the same as smoke, and as i have already stated, cancers have never been induced in an animal study with tobacco smoke - as conceded in court. Excluding the F344 rats of course, which do not qualify as science.

    Again, most of the rest of your excerpts are supposed quotes. As Rollo is so often exclaiming, we must use in context, and i take it one further and say in circumstance. Who are these people besides 'workers', did they leave, were they fired? Did all the workers agree? If not, why not? You're trying to convince us SHS is harmful because of some condensate on nude mice, and a couple people saying it was dangerous - over 20 years ago.... come on now, really?

    They can't even prove active smoking is dangerous, how the hell is a seriously diluted version of that smoke going to be equally, or more, dangerous?

    ReplyDelete
  124. and if i may quote someone else on the document kylegl,

    The key difference between this Judge (Gladys Kessler) and Nimmo Smith in the ITL vs McTear case was that Kessler was happy to rely on the US Surgeon General's reports - i.e. secondary rather than primary evidence. The tobacco companies' expert witnesses including a Professor of Mathematical Statistics and another Nobel Prize winning scientist, were generally dismissed as not experienced enough in the field of smoking and health.

    This, from the Judge's introduction:
    'The Government’s witnesses, viewed as a whole, were far more experienced, credentialed, and active in the area of smoking and health, whatever their particular area of specialty, than were the Defendants’. Many of the Government experts had participated extensively, over many years, in the long and drawn-out process of ascertaining the consensus of scientific opinions embodied in each Surgeon General’s Report.'

    Taking the US Surgeon General's reports, the judge accepted that tobacco caused various diseases and noted the date at which 'consensus' had been reached. She then concluded that any research funded by tobacco companies after this date could only have been carried out for the express purpose of misleading the public.

    The verdict was therefore inevitable provided the Government witnesses could prove the funding. This was not difficult. The main body of the judgement relates the contents of tobacco company archives that proved what funding occurred when and by who. Each companies' actions being considered separately.

    ReplyDelete
  125. Rollo,

    You do make me giggle; you avoid every issue by twisting the subject then accuse me of doing it lol. Where are the answers to all the questions I asked? Oops you avoided them.

    Not only that but you say something completely stupid and instead of admitting it you said it again lolololol. Now to get back to the issue:

    Your made up, incorrect and stupid statements about larger studies carrying more weight and adding junk studies together makes them good.

    If there is a study of 200 000 peaople does it mean that all the studies with less than that number are no good lol?

    Listen up....

    Statistical power is the probability of finding an effect if it’s real. A formula for difference in means will give you the sample size required which represents the desired power, the significance level, the standard deviation, the effect size and the case/control ratio.

    So now the statistician has the sample size required.

    Now while you had your fingers in your ears earlier singing lala I pointed out what would really happen if you increase the sample size:

    All it does is narrow the width; if it doesn't tend to point to the original result then the methodology is flawed.

    So your whole argument that weak statistical correlations can be added together to somehow improve the result is completely made up.

    Pretty much the same as the rest of your comments.

    And while we are talking about the BS you make up in your head, show me one study that accounts for all confounders and from the ones that attempt to account for a few explain to me how they measured lifetime exposures to those confounders.

    P.S. The comment you quoted from Gian came from my work on LHC's ;) (in his own words)

    Now have a sleep and dream up some more garbage so you can pretend you know what you are talking about.

    ReplyDelete
  126. Rich White:

    I see you’ve come back for more, but deal with ONLY SOME of the points I raised in my earlier post. Why are you so selective?

    1. Judging by your silence, I take it that you accept you got the name of SCOTH wrong.
    2. You claimed SCOTH cherry-picked evidence. I asked you to give me examples of startling omissions. Silence from you.
    3. I see you’ve nothing to say on the Simon Chapman comments, which it seems you just copied and pasted from the Forces website.

    As for the comments you did make, who’s twisting Doll’s words? You were trying to insinuate underhand play from Bradford-Hill. But Doll was clearing stating Bradford-Hill’s intentions were honourable in seeking to demonstrate results he had already discovered on a larger stage that others could not ignore.

    Why do you accuse me of switching between SCOTH reports? It was you who was getting the reports confused, when you asked “Fourth, despite being touted as a report on the effects of second hand smoke on non-smokers, the bulk of it actually focuses on active smoking and effects on smokers, not non-smokers.” As I stated (and you never appeared to recognise), there were actually 2 SCOTH reports. The first covered active and passive smoking; the second looked at passive smoking only.
    As for age, there is nothing wrong with defining “middle age” as covering 35-69 years. That study just used a fairly large bandwidth for “middle age” at both ends. After all, would many 35 year olds consider themselves middle-aged? A UK man aged 65 can expect to live another 17.2 years on average, and a woman aged 65 another 19.9 years (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?ID=168). So there’s a whole lot of life left in people beyond 69. Something which you seem to believe is unimportant.
    My point about “health benefits” was clear. You were trying to reel off examples of possible health benefits for people who smoke. But where are all the supposed health benefits for people who are subjected to other people’s secondhand smoke? The studies you cited all related to active smoking.
    Your claim that “If the studies show no risk individually, then that is the bottom line” and that only homogeneous studies can be included in meta-analyses is utterly wrong. I provided evidence to Steve to underline that point. I see neither you nor he have any evidence to offer to back up your dubious claims.
    You say a pub is private property. True, to a point. But if a publican wants to sell alcohol, s/he has to agree to lose some of the freedoms of a private property owner. They’re not allowed to give alcohol to minors. They need to fulfil fire and food hygiene requirements. In fact they need to fulfil many health and safety requirements. No allowing smoking inside the pub is just one of these. If you disagree, are you seriously suggesting that pubs should be allowed to serve alcohol to 14 year olds, which is where your argument would take you?
    There’s no “official” risk of 1.18. A 25% increased risk of lung cancer and heart disease may be low in Relative Risk terms. But, in public health terms, it’s enough to account for thousands of needless deaths in the UK alone each year.

    ReplyDelete
  127. Steve

    Like Rich, you have chosen to ignore the challenges I have set you.

    Where is your evidence that all epidemiological studies should be assessed in complete isolation of each other, against a rigid 95% CI and with no opportunity for corroborating evidence?

    Where is your evidence that meta-analyses can only apply to studies with completely homogeneous methodologies?

    Was it ignorance or a deliberate attempt to lie which led you to misquote Marcia Angell?

    As for the points you do make…

    You seem to forget that the point I was making about the importance of particular studies related to how much they influence the results of meta-analyses. I was commenting in response to a remark about how the 2006 US Surgeon General’s report included some studies with very small sample sizes. I was not remarking about making specific studies larger (which is what you appear to think). I entirely accept that the validity of results depend on the robustness of the methodology as much as the sample size.

    BUT meta-analyses are valuable for allowing meaningful conclusions to be reached from a group of studies (with robust methodologies), even if those studies individually do not allow strong conclusions to be drawn.

    You ask me to point you to studies addressing all confounders. I’ll firstly point you to the He et al study (NEJM, 1999), which sets out how different studies have addressed different confounders – and shown that the results of all these studies are similar (i.e. no one confounder is strong enough to make a significant difference to the study results).

    Also look at Brennan et al (http://www.data-yard.net/science/ets_lung/brennan04.pdf), where particularly strong efforts were made to address potential lack of standardization in defining exposure and the potential for publication bias. It concluded that “Sensitivity analysis for the effects of misclassification (both positive and negative) indicated that the observed risks are likely to underestimate the true risk”.

    But your term “lifetime exposures” worries me. Are you suggesting that the dangers of passive smoking should be ignored unless they are demonstrated through an impossibly lengthy, expensive and intrusive investigation into exactly how much secondhand smoke participants inhale? If that’s the case, you are trying to apply impossible standards in an effort to avoid the truth.

    And do you believe the same standards should also be required for epidemiological studies into the dangers of radon gas, UV light and diesel fumes?

    ReplyDelete
  128. Jonathan Bagley said...
    Would Rollo please reveal his identity or if anyone out there knows who he is, please can they tell me.

    Slightly different spelling, but there surely can't be more than one Rollo....

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1127115/Council-tax-levy-middle-class-Labour-plan-base-bills-social-background.html

    Do not buy a house in the UK - move to Bangkok and become a Europhile.

    David

    ReplyDelete
  129. Wow! That Rollo Tommasi seems to have a slightly more exotic lifestyle than me!!

    Home for me is wet and windy (but still charming) Edinburgh.

    ReplyDelete
  130. Could be a wind up, Rollo (or an extraordinary coincidence). You can't blame anyone for putting two and two together and coming up with five - you're always doing it.

    BTW, do you agree with Rollo's comments, particularly the 'send the EU troops in' bit?

    Quite relevant to this blog

    and a distinct possibility....

    David

    ReplyDelete
  131. Rollo,

    you talk about the dangers of "the dangers of passive smoking" as if the "dangers" bit is a demonstrable fact and that this in turn is a reason to abolish every single smoking venue in the UK. Rollo, you know I don't tend to get involved with your discussions on black box risks much, this is partly because I have sympathy for what you say but mostly because I am more interested in the harm theory of primary tobacco smoke. But let's up the risk to above 3, where (in theory) everyone should be comfortable. Now, I am working from memory here (so be gentle), but say
    the rr for cervical cancer is ~4 for a never smoking woman married to ever smoking man and that the rr is ~3 for HPV never smoker to ever smoker.
    Do we just assume that the difference between the two is a causal - passive smoking causes cervical cancer? On the face of it the argument for abolishing
    smoking venues is even stronger here. A woman working in a smoking pub is more likely to get cervical cancer, so if we turn that pub into a smokefree resturant
    that woman is less likely to get cervical cancer - also probably true (fantastic public health in action)! But the point is that given that HPV is involved
    ~99.7% of cervical cancers and given the small chance that infection of HPV is caused by ETS, this much bigger "risk" is no justification for abolishing smoking venues - whatsoever.

    Rollo, the rr for this cancer is ~10 fold higher than those claimed for ETS and lung cancer!!!

    Do you really believe that ETS causes this very much larger risk?

    Rollo, despite billions spent on research over decades, we still can not demonstrate in a court of law that smoking causes lung cancer!?!

    And you want me to give up the freedom to just sit in a smoking venue , smoke a fag, maybe have a bite to eat - for this!!

    You ask too much Rollo!

    Yes I want tobacco control out of SCOTH - ASAP. Please.

    ReplyDelete
  132. Rollo, re. your response of 00.13 29/1. When I asked if you had an objection to smokers forming smokers' clubs, I was assuming that they would buy a property for the purpose, not use one of their houses. To my mind, this would be private property. Would you object to the law being changed to allow this? To keep it simple, let's assume that this property is very isolated with no possibility of any nuisance caused to any neighbours.

    ReplyDelete
  133. Rollo,
    I didn't comment on the name of SCOTH because, really, it's not the key issue. Do you want to go over each point indefinitely?

    Regarding Forces, I didn't get Chapman's quote from them, in fact I've not seen their comments on SCOTH at all. Do you even know who Chapman is?

    You still don't see the problem with defining middle age as spanning 30 years? Next time you turn the news on and they say x% of smokers die in middle age, that now means they could have died at 69 years of age. That is NOT middle age and so categorically WRONG

    I've not given cherry picked data from SCOTH because, as i've said to you before, i'm not your personal research tool. This site already has every study listed, so you run along and compare them, i've done it already. I see you're also still using Jamrozik, who i've already explained to you why is more crap.

    Who's twisting Doll's words? YOU! Because any time i, or someone else, posts an exact, unadultered quote from someone you refuse to accept it means what it says and twist it to mean something else. When Doll admitted the study was conducted to generate maximum publicity, how is that honourable?

    Actually, both Steve and I have countered your claim that studies can just be meshed together. Again, you're squirming to ignore the fact. As for benefits, have i ever said the benefits of smokers transfer to SHS? No, so what's your point? My point regarding that is that tobacco isn't the demon killer it's portrayed and it DOES have some very significant health benefits. And as i also stated before, there does appear to be a protective effect against lung cancer for passive smokers.

    Increased risk doesn't mean guaranteed risk. You've consistently ignored my point that 60% of smokers outlive the life expectancy, and only 10-15% of smokers get lung cancer. Doll's own work found that even a smoker has a 99.9% chance of not developing the disease.

    A pub is a private property. Sure, they hold a license to sell alcohol but they have the right to not allow the public on their property. A private property is one owned by an individual person who can choose what goes on in their premises. Food standards are mandatory for any food place, understandably. Alcohol itself cannot be sold to minors anywhere, but it can be consumed by the people who can buy it, unlike tobacco.

    The 11,000 deaths you continually speak of are fabricated figures. Do you even know how they're generated?

    ReplyDelete
  134. Fredrik: I don’t know much about the studies into passive smoking and cervical cancer (I am still learning!). You ask if we just assume that passive smoking causes cervical cancer. My answer is clearly no – the evidence has to stand up to scrutiny.

    As far as I know, neither ASH nor CRUK claim that passive smoking causes cervical cancer. Doesn’t that show they’re actually cautious about attributing blame to passive smoking? And this careful approach has been symptomatic of the major bodies in the past. Passive smoking has only really been recognized as a cause of heart disease in the last 15 years. And they have not been fast at stating definitively that passive smoking is a cause of cancer, despite recent emerging evidence.

    I have no particular desire to support a law that deprives you of a pleasure. But when your pleasure puts the health of others at risk, I place priority on their health over your pleasure.

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  135. Jonathan: I personally would have no problem with a smokers’ club in a private property, subject to certain conditions to prevent loopholes. For instance, the club couldn’t have staff (whose welfare has to be protected). And your club couldn’t charge for admission, items, services, etc (because to allow that would be to open up a huge loophole).

    If you did that, then as far as I’m concerned you wouldn’t even have to use a property in the back of beyond.

    But do the various UK laws not allow for this already?

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  136. Rich:

    Definition of “middle age”: You seem obsessed with the presentational definition of “middle age” in news bulletins. My interest is in giving everyone the best possible chance to have a long and healthy life expectancy if that is what they want. My reason for arguing with you is that you seem to come across as if you’re trying to suggest that we should not be too concerned if people over 69 die of a disease caused by passive smoking. Maybe that’s not what you’re trying to say, but that’s how it reads to me. You should not be surprised to learn that I totally disagree with such a view.

    “Cherry-picking” from SCOTH: It was you who raised the accusation that SCOTH had cherry-picked studies. (“Third, it contained no new science at all, only reviewed existing studies - and only ones that supported what they wanted to hear.”) It is up to you to either justify your accusation or retract it. So far you’ve done neither.

    Doll’s words: Yes, YOU are twisting his words. It is clear from the article you gathered the quote from that B-H wanted to “generate maximum publicity” for a research finding he had discovered, which had potentially major public health implications and which people at the time were ignoring. That WAS honourable.

    Meta-analyses: I’m still waiting for you or Steve to provide me with independent expert evidence that meta-analyses of passive smoking studies should be disregarded because the studies are not of a homogeneous methodology. I’ve shown how George Davey Smith (an expert on meta-analyses and no anti-smoker) respects meta-analyses on this subject. Where’s your evidence?

    A pub as private property: You seem to be confused on this one. Publicans can apply any voluntary restriction they want – including not allowing certain people into the pub. But they are REQUIRED to adhere to many statutory restrictions in order to hold a license. Not allowing smoking inside is only one of these restrictions. Others include food standards, fire standards, not serving intoxicated people, not allowing a public disturbance to be caused, not serving outside licensed hours and conforming with employment law.

    11,000 deaths. The figure is an informed estimate; it is not “fabricated” as you claim (without any evidence to back up your claim, which you almost always omit). I’ve read the Jamrozik study and studies from which figures he used are drawn. What have you read?

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  137. "r" is me, by the way!

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  138. Rollo, you're not understanding me on middle age. People dying over 69 are just as much a concern as people dying at age 50, but at 69 they are in old age and not far from the life expectancy. You see, most people regard middle age to be around 40-55, so hearing smoking kills lots of people in middle age is startling. When someone dies in old age it is expected, don't you agree? So to claim old age is middle aged is a downright lie, and nothing but manipulation of numbers to make smoking seem more harmful than it is.

    SCOTH - I maintain what I said. And i maintain that every study has been linked to on this page, and SCOTH does not contain each one.

    Jamrozik, i have read his 'study' - do you know his death number is a guesstimate? In other words, unsubstantiated. I will reiterate here what i said to you on my site in response to your questions from the Scotsman "This report doesn't provide us with any new information on the risks of passive smoking. It merely takes existing research and calculates all the number of people who would die if all the suggested risks proved to be accurate, and you're comfortable with this are you? In 2003 the BMJ published a study of 120,000 adults in California over a 40-year period, which concluded that 'the results do not support a causal association between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco-related mortality, though they do not rule out a small effect'. As a BMJ editorial concluded at the time, 'the considerable problems with measurement imprecision, confounding, and the small predicted excess risks limit the degree to which conventional observational epidemiology can address the effects of exposure to environmental tobacco smoke'.What you probably won't read in the papers is Jamrozik's acknowledgement of assistance from Deborah Arnott of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), the UK's main anti-smoking campaign. Nor will you read his note that 'the calculations in this paper were commissioned by SmokeFree London, a collaboration of 33 local borough councils in London concerned with extension of smoke-free policies in that city'. Jamrozik's report is a piece of advocacy dressed up as science and should be treated with considerable scepticism"

    You're still accusing me of 'twisting' Doll's words. Here's the thing: i pasted his exact quote. You have taken that quote, and transformed it to something else, then come back and tell me i'm twisting it.

    Meta-analyses - what are you talking about? We haven't been discussing that. And you haven't exactly supported your argument that despite SHS risks being low in individual studies it is scientifically valid to just lump the studies together - despite me telling you how respected non-smoking statistician Philip Burch slammed the 1964 SG report for doing exactly that. He also re-plotted Doll's Doctor study data to discover what Doll claimed is not what was actually found.

    You're still confused on private property, and as usual you're not comparing like for like. A bartender serving food means the responsibility lies on the owner to make sure the food is safe. In fact all your examples are of keeping the customers safe using the owners responsibility. smoking is not the owner's responsibility. Cigarettes are legal to buy, taxed and legal to consume in whatever quantity desired. It is the proprietor's right to decide if he/she allows that activity. Your logic suggests that because food carries a risk of food poisoning food must not be served. That isn't the case. The responsiblity with smoking comes solely down to the customers - if a non-smoker knows it is a smoking establishment they choose to go in. The government has no place in private property.

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  139. Oh, Rollo, 'informed estimate' is a polite way of saying fabricated. Why? Because it is not a solid figure, it is plucked out of thin air by the 'researcher'. If i estimate there to be 100 sweets in a jar, that doesn't mean it's true. I have made that number up, or 'estimated' it. Jamrozik made up the number of 11,000 deaths based on his bias research, as backed up in my above post.

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  140. Rich:

    Age of deaths: Rich – I’m not getting any evidence of the media actually picking up the figures you refer to and saying “Look – these are how many middle-aged people are dying”.

    SCOTH: Give me examples of studies which SCOTH supposedly disregarded or retract your claim. It’s your claim. It’s up to you to prove it.

    Doll’s words: There is absolutely nothing dodgy about the phrase that a study “devised by Sir Austin Bradford Hill to achieve maximum publicity for the critical link between smoking and lung cancer”. It only becomes a problem if B-H was trying to maximise publicity for a made-up link. But the quote doesn’t say that. Nor does the surrounding context. In fact, the context made clear that B-H was trying to maximise publicity for what he had discovered to be true. That, I repeat, is honourable. You’ve tried to infer dodginess in Doll’s quote when there was none to be found.

    Meta-analyses: I’m not sure what general point about meta-analysis you are trying to draw from Philip Burch’s specific criticisms of a particular report 45 years ago.

    You say "This report doesn't provide us with any new information on the risks of passive smoking. It merely takes existing research and calculates all the number of people who would die if all the suggested risks proved to be accurate”. Actually, I agree with that assessment. Before Jamrozik, there were plenty of studies which set out the dangers of passive smoking in terms of relative risk. But very few studies translated those relative risks into quantifiable numbers of deaths. That was the purpose of his study. His conclusions were based on established figures for relative risks and number of people exposed to secondhand smoke. Those figures have a certain margin of error, but are basically sound. As a result, Jamrozik’s figures had to be an estimate, but they accurately reflect the degree of magnitude of passive smoking related deaths.

    Sorry, but Enstrom & Kabat’s study was not of “120,000 adults in California over a 40-year period”. They had information over 40 years from just 7,000 surviving adults. The information they had on people who had died was based on the death certificates of 74,000 adults and information about their lifestyles over just 13 years (1959-72). Its results were actually quite small. E&K based their relative risk of lung cancer in never smoking women married to ever smokers on fewer than 200 cases. Compare that with the IARC meta-analysis, which was based on 46 studies and almost 6,300 cases. So the results of E&K are completely over-shadowed by other studies showing a clear risk of lung cancer from passive smoking. The BMJ editorial on E&K does indeed state that care must be taken in attaching too much weight to the precise results of epidemiological studies. But it also states that E&K “may overemphasise the negative nature of their findings”. It also suggests that the CPS-I data is outdated (in terms of reflecting social realities), compared with CPS-II data.

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  141. Oops. Forgot to respond to your point about pubs as “private property”. The government has every place in private property, where it is needed for public welfare. It is the publican’s responsibility to safeguard patrons and bar staff from secondhand smoke. In this way, the responsibility on the publican is the same as that which applies to owners of other “private properties” such as cinemas, trains, offices and restaurants.

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  142. I appear to have lost a couple of paragraphs of my reply to you. Another was about Jamrozik. I don’t see expressions of thanks to Deborah Arnott or Smokefree London as grounds for criticising Jamrozik’s study. Either criticise the study on its merits or not at all.

    I think I’ve now dealt with all your points.

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  143. "You ask if we just assume that passive smoking causes cervical cancer. My answer is clearly no – the evidence has to stand up to scrutiny." - Rollo
    This is my point, in the case of cervical cancer, despite having a much stronger and consistent strength of assocation with ETS than the implied risk of CVD of LC, there is an identified and real confounder
    that shows a woman working in a smoking venue has nothing to fear from my smoke - she just has to make sure stears clear of me!(most women are sensible enough to do this, sadly, for me).
    The fact of the matter is that one can not adjust for a confounder that one has no idea exists. And one can not assume that that confounder does not exist just because it has not been found !!!
    So how do we know that a SCOTH independent of tobacco control would not look at things like these and come to different conclusions?
    Would an independent SCOTH look at the emerging evidence that HPV is found in LC?
    Would an independent SCOTH be interested in the role of smoke suspended niacin and p53 expression?

    Would an independent SCOTH conclude that ETS risks are at the arse end of a curve that has absolutely no causal role in chronic diseases?

    Would an independent SCOTH conclude that the link between smoking and chronic diseases is just that – a link?

    Rollo, everything that I have said above could be complete tosh.

    But how can the public be sure when SCOTH is compromised by Tobacco Control?

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  144. Rollo, The smoking ban was written to stop precisely what I am suggesting (or else the country would be full of smokers' clubs). The Act classes volunteers as employees.
    I've stopped joining in statistical arguments because they lead nowhere. Living in a smoky house for 20 years probably isn't healthy, and neither is walking through Manchester city centre twice a day, but it seems to me that the amount of money, time and energy spent by anti-smokers on (often clearly fraudulently) trying to assert that a harmful amount of smoke can esccape from a negatively pressurised room with a good extractor or that a room used for smoking cannot be safely entered for a short period hours later, indicates irrational zealotry rather than a concern for health. If this was a "normal" concern for the health of non-smokers, then groups would be campaigning against many other much more hazardous activities. But they generally don't. Other activities are dealt with with an acceptance of some small level of risk and an acceptance that people have a certain amount of free will. 60 to 70 people die in the construction industry each year but it still goes on. A high exposure to food frying is possibly carcinogenic, but that still goes on. I presume you've got some sort of medical statistics background, but your views aren't shared by most people who've been involved with tobacco control, even those reponsible for smoking bans. Professor Julian Le Grand, The Government Chief Scientific Advisor, admitted on R5Live and to Simon Clarke that the smoking ban was brought in an attempt to lower active smoking rates. You also must admit that recent attempts to assert that smoking bans lead to an instant decrease in heart attacks (or should that be acute coronary syndrome?) have plumbed new depths and bring science into disrepute. The NEJM belatedly published the Pell paper which used the then unbanned English population as a control against the Scottish ban a few weeks AFTER it was known that heart attacks in England had decreased by only 2.8% in the year since the English ban. As Pell assumed the two poulations to be alike in every respect, except one being subject to a smoking ban, she should have commented that although acute coronary syndrome (not the heart attacks of the original Glasgow University press release) in Scotland may have decreased markedly, the English experience seemed to point to no effect on heart attacks. This may be medically possible, but as it was known, it should have been mentioned. It's a nonsense, isn't it? Tell me if I'm wrong because I'd rather be wrong than conclude that the NEJM publishes such glaring errors.

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  145. LOL - Rollo, we'll have to agree to disagree. This is getting us nowhere. I have noticed that as usual you select the points you want to respond to - much like the results you choose to respond to. You like to play games, I don't. Good luck in your discussions with other members, but I have far too many other things to be getting on with and can't devote any more time to running round in circles with your ego and I'm sure you'll agree we've spent quite a lot of time debating this back and forth. It's reached a natural end

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  146. Rich - I honestly thought I'd responded to all your points - and directly too. Shame you don't agree. I was actually thinking of you playing games, while I try to debate the real issues earnestly. Funny thing perception, eh?

    What I still cannot believe is the lack of evidence you provide. You've written a book. You presumably will have read a lot of materials. Any self-respecting author would not make claims without being able to substantiate them. Since you've made so many claims on this board and in the Scotsman, I really expected you to have a pile of references to support what you've been claiming. But it seems not.

    Fredrik/Jonathan - Your comments deserve replies. I will try to, but it may not be for a good while!

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  147. Fair enough Rollo, have a great weekend!

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  148. Rollo, perception sure is a funny thing. Maybe i'm just jaded, you wouldn't believe what we have to hear on an almost daily basis. I do have a ton of evidence, whether you agree with my book or not (and i hope you will reserve judgement given that you've not read it) i'm sure you can't deny it'd be hard to write a book from a purely opinionated point of view, especially when it looks almost exclusively at studies. Please don't confuse a book with a discussion, my answers depend on the questions - questions can be misinterpreted, phrased awkwardly, or just a trap. You claim i lack references, but remember that the things i have claimed come from the research i have done - i may forget to include the reference itself at times, but, as an example, when i quote someone without the reference the quote itself still exists and was found through research. Also, while you claim i lack the references, i disagree - as far as i'm aware, i've responded to everything you have said, including your claim that de Flora's mice study is valid, and have only failed to respond to you when you continue to ask the same thing because you're unsatisfied - i'm not an orgasm donor, it's not my duty to satisfy your every whim and some things you just need to do yourself. If i've answered something, i'm not going to keep answering it. So, as i said, i think when all is said and done this has gone as far as it can go.

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  149. Lol Rollo, my sides are splitting. It's been ages since I tore apart a Nazi's belief system and you are daft enough to keep believing it lol.

    I'll try to answer your gibberish as if you were 10 so that you get the picture.

    ------------------------------------------
    Rollo Tommasi said...

    "Where is your evidence that all epidemiological studies should be assessed in complete isolation of each other, against a rigid 95% CI and with no opportunity for corroborating evidence?"

    ------------------------------------------

    I never said any such thing. I said you can't simply add together dissimilar studies, here's an example for the intellectually challenged:

    You decide to study how long things stay ripe after they have been picked. Study 1 gives the result that apples stay ripe for 7 days and it takes into account humidity of the room the apples are stored in. Study 2 gives the result that bananas stay ripe for 5 days and it takes into account the temperature of the room they are stored in.

    Now Rollo comes along and adds them together and says the result is now 6 days!

    The result of what is 6 days Rollo?

    Now, what are you babbling about when you say "a rigid 95%"? Your CI can be anything you want it to be but the more you reduce it the more likely your result is arrived at purely by chance. What is unscientific however is dropping it from 95% to 90% when you discover you didn't get the result you had already declared before you finished collecting the data.

    ---------------------------------------

    Rollo Tommasi said...

    "Where is your evidence that meta-analyses can only apply to studies with completely homogeneous methodologies?"

    ---------------------------------------

    Well you may understand the answer for ten year olds I gave above and although I never used the term "completely homogeneous" you might like to attempt reading the following from the British Medical Journal:

    "Several problems arise in meta-analysis: regressions are often non -linear; effects are often multivariate rather than univariate; coverage can be restricted; bad studies may be included; the data summarised may not be homogeneous; grouping different causal factors may lead to meaningless estimates of effects; and the theory-directed approach may obscure discrepancies. Meta-analysis may not be the one best method for studying the diversity of fields for which it has been used."

    Just one or two problems with it then Rollo huh?

    -----------------------------------------

    Rollo Tommasi said...

    "Was it ignorance or a deliberate attempt to lie which led you to misquote Marcia Angell?"

    -----------------------------------------

    As I've pointed out twice it was neither; I didn't misquote her at all. What you actually attempted to do is say I didn't quote the irrelevant other things she said because you were babbling on about this silly idea of adding bad studies together to make a good one.

    -------------------------------------------

    Rollo Tommasi said...

    "You seem to forget that the point I was making about the importance of particular studies related to how much they influence the results of meta-analyses."

    ------------------------------------------

    Errr No. You said larger studies carry more weight and adding them together makes them better.

    -------------------------------------------

    Rollo Tommasi said...

    "I entirely accept that the validity of results depend on the robustness of the methodology as much as the sample size."

    -------------------------------------------

    I'm very glad to hear it. Can you see any problems with the "robustness of the methodology" of a study that asks people to guess how much passive smoke their dead relative inhaled 10 years ago?

    ------------------------------------------

    Rollo Tommasi said...

    "BUT meta-analyses are valuable for allowing meaningful conclusions to be reached from a group of studies (with robust methodologies), even if those studies individually do not allow strong conclusions to be drawn."

    -------------------------------------------

    First, read everything I posted above, second where is there an anti smoking study with "robust methodology"?, third how do you add weak statistical correlations together to make a strong one?

    ------------------------------------------

    Rollo Tommasi said...

    "You ask me to point you to studies addressing all confounders. I’ll firstly point you to the He et al study (NEJM, 1999), which sets out how different studies have addressed different confounders – and shown that the results of all these studies are similar (i.e. no one confounder is strong enough to make a significant difference to the study results)."

    -------------------------------------------

    That is an anti smoking meta analysis, the king of all junk, and of course it said whichever confounder was used it made little difference because none of them accounted for more than one or two confounders and none of them accounted for the important ones.; Now why don't you answer my question - You said that ALL the studies accounted for all confounders which was a plain lie. In fact find me one that just accounts for the "biggies" like diet, bias, profession, exercise, socio economic status, alcohol consumption. You'll be looking for a long time because there isn't one. And if you believe the garbage from your meta analysis just a little bit of common sense ought to disabuse you of the silly notion that they don't make any difference. Or are you going to tell me that people who never exercise, eat fatty foods, drink a lot and work down the mines don't suffer health problems?

    ------------------------------------------

    Rollo Tommasi said...

    "Also look at Brennan et al"

    -----------------------------------------

    Another meta analysis, you seem to be fond of them although this one does you no favours. The two studies that they looked at accounted for occupation as a confounder, what about all the others?. The meta analysis itself admits the problems with misclassification bias after 60% of the control groups who claimed they were never exposed to passive smoke were found to have cotinine in their urine! The remaining 40% are equally deluded, so the control groups were actually no different to the case groups which completely nullifies any comparisons. On top of that the US study relies solely on the relatives of dead people to provide guesses at how much passive smoke the dead person inhaled.

    ------------------------------------------

    Rollo Tommasi said...

    "But your term “lifetime exposures” worries me. Are you suggesting that the dangers of passive smoking should be ignored unless they are demonstrated through an impossibly lengthy, expensive and intrusive investigation into exactly how much secondhand smoke participants inhale? If that’s the case, you are trying to apply impossible standards in an effort to avoid the truth."

    -------------------------------------------

    No. and it's not "my term".

    Smoking related diseases (more accurately referred to by non Nazi's as heart and respiratory diseases)have long latency periods of many decades (your Nazi statistician claims it is 50 years, Peto 2001). Now if it takes up to 50 years to develop these diseases then you would need to measure exposure to all suspected causes over the same time period in order to point at a culprit.

    In 2004 the EPA stated that 14% of all lung cancers are caused by Radon. If you just measure (A Nazi word for "pluck from thin air") passive smoke exposure of lung cancer patients and ignore Radon then your results will be inaccurate by up to 14%.

    And that is just Radon!

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  150. Rollo, before leaving this, I have one question for you as you've not replied to it on the Scotsman. You mention de Flora's study, are you aware they used A/J mice? In case you don't know, these are inbred mice specifically bred to develop lung cancer. Do you not think this leads to pre-determined results and is not real science, but bogus and bias created specifically to claim smoking causes lung cancer? Besides the A/J mice, there are also F344 rats, which are essentially the rat-equivelant i.e. specially bred to develop cancer

    I'd just like to hear your answer to this

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  151. Rollo Tommasi said...

    "I personally would have no problem with a smokers’ club in a private property, subject to certain conditions to prevent loopholes. For instance, the club couldn’t have staff (whose welfare has to be protected)."

    Spoken like a true Nazi !

    Firstly only Nazi propaganda says there is anything to be protected from.

    Secondly only a fascist scumbag would seek to "protect" people for their own good according to his own ideology.

    People can never be allowed to make their own choices can they Rollo? Sieg Heil !!!

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  152. Fredrik: If I understand you correctly, you are saying that an independent SCOTH might identify a confounder which to date is unknown. I actually disagree. From what I understand, the role of SCOTH is not to commission new research. It is to advise based on existing research. If there were an unknown confounder, it would be discovered through one of the other pieces of research, which could be commissioned by any body at any time. You would only have to worry about the independence of SCOTH if they chose to ignore an important piece of evidence.

    Again I say I do not believe SCOTH is unduly influenced by tobacco control. Its conclusions are no different to conclusions which other bodies and researchers have reached.

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  153. Jonathan:

    I have some sympathy with the idea of separate smoking rooms. But I just don’t think they’d work in practice. First, they would be a pipe dream (if you’ll excuse the pun) for the many community pubs which are suffering most just now. The layout of many of these pubs does not suit carving out a separate room an, even if it did, the costs involved would be prohibitive. I think most of these publicans prefer a “level playing field” of a universal ban to a situation where larger pubs could create separate smoking rooms, but they could not.

    Secondly, experience tells us how absolutely appalling pub ventilation was when smoking was allowed. I know some people will argue that standards of ventilation continue to improve. But that’s only half the point. Ventilation in the past was poor because systems were either turned off or not maintained properly. I don’t see how you ensure that publicans maintain highest ventilation standards at all times.

    You mention Professor le Grand. Actually, he’s not the “Government Chief Scientific Advisor”. He’s a health economist. The Government’s chief medial advisers are its 4 Chief Medical Officers (for Eng, NI, Sco & Wal). They all strongly hold the view that passive smoking is hazardous to health.

    I strongly believe in the evidence showing long-term dangers of passive smoking to health. I am less convinced by recent studies into the acute/immediate effects. In that sense, my views are similar to those of Michael Siegel. So I would argue that immediate reductions in heart attack levels should not be expected as a result of the smoking laws – those reductions will take time to appear and may not even be particularly noticeable in statistical terms. But in terms of people’s lives, they will make a real difference, especially if they help change the behaviour of smokers about how they expose their loved ones to smoke in the home.

    I’ll say one other thing about the Pell study. I do believe it was worthy of reporting in the NEJM. The study which produced the finding of a 17% drop in acute coronary syndrome admissions was robust (I tested this idea with Michael Siegel’s blog and he thought this was reasonable). The problem with Pell was the attempt to extrapolate a conclusion that the introduction of the smoking laws in Scotland was a major cause of this drop. To do this, she had to use a different definition of ACS to allow a comparison to be made with England, which is not good practice.

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  154. Rich – De Flora et al (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12628522). They actually used Swiss albino mice as well as strain A/J. And, while I have reservations about animal experimentation generally, for the purposes of research there is nothing about using strain A/J mice which inherently makes the results invalid. Those mice are simply more susceptible to risk factors which existed anyway – no smoke without fire.

    But my bigger point is about animal experimentation generally. Whatever the ethical rights and wrongs, scientists have still not been able to simulate passive smoking conditions for humans in an accurate way for animals in these experiments. So the results of these experiments – both positive and negative – should be read with caution.

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  155. Steve:

    Once again you come in aggressively with a few insults to match. If only the power of your argument matched your offensiveness.

    You start with a condescending hypothetical example involving apples and bananas. Make that condescending, hypothetical and completely irrelevant. Your example uses different types of subject. Studies into the dangers of passive smoking look at one type of subject only (sometimes lung cancer cases, sometimes heart disease cases, sometimes other).

    You say “What is unscientific however is dropping it from 95% to 90% when you discover you didn't get the result you had already declared before you finished collecting the data.” Again not an issue in these studies. The passive smoking studies report the confidence index at 95% because that is the norm, but not the requirement.

    You then quote Eysenck from the BMJ. He does indeed list a number of issues to watch with meta-analyses. But, if you read these concerns carefully, you will find that none of them deal with including studies which used different methodologies. He talked about data not being homogeneous, but that is not what you and I are arguing about. So another red herring from you.

    I’ve made my position clear about your Marcia Angell (mis-)quote and the weight to be given to larger studies in meta-analyses. You and I are clearly not going to agree on this. So I’m not going to raise this any further.

    You ask how weak statistical correlations can be added to make a strong one. The answer is as SCOTH concluded in 1998. The overall assessment of the evidence against Bradford-Hill’s criteria may be strong, even if it less convincing in one or two of these (in this case, strength). That is the case with passive smoking.

    Your criticism of He et al is complete nonsense. First of all, you are wrong to claim that I said all the studies accounted for all confounders. I actually said “different studies have addressed different confounders”.

    Then you wrongly claim “none of them accounted for more than one or two confounders and none of them accounted for the important one”. Utter drivel! For instance, the study included Kawachi et al (1997), which deals with +12 confounders, including age, alcohol consumption, BMI, exercise, saturated fat intake and vitamin E intake. Others (e.g. Steenland et al (1996)) cover level of education. In short, what you describe as the “biggies” are all accounted for in at least some of the studies. You described He et al as “an anti smoking meta analysis, the king of all junk”, based on your wrongful claims. Would you care to re-appraise your opinion of this study?

    You clearly have not looked at the Brennan study closely either. You understate the confounders dealt with – diet, occupation, educational level and possible misclassification. You claim “the US study relies solely on the relatives of dead people to provide guesses at how much passive smoke the dead person inhaled”. In fact, interviews with next-of-kin took place with only one-third of potential US cases and none of the European cases. The report deals with the modest scope for mis-classification well. Ironically, you shoot your own argument down by raising the issue from a previous study about 60% of control group who claimed not to have been exposed to passive smoke who were found to have detectable traces of cotinine in their urine. The effect of this factor is to artificially LOWER the relative risk findings.

    Your comments about “lifetime exposures” show the ludicrous nature of your position beyond all doubt. The logical conclusion of your position is that passive smoking should not be accepted as a health risk until confirmed by a 50 year long cohort study. That’s absolutely ridiculous, when the evidence of people dying from passive smoking is real now.

    Final confirmation of the hypocrisy of your argument comes when you mention radon gas. You obviously accept the danger that radon causes to health. But that risk has been established using the very same epidemiological methods as for passive smoking, with the very same limitations. Strange how you should be prepared to live with the limitations for the one (radon) but not the other (passive smoking).

    You keep with the abuse and offensive Nazi references if you want. All they do is make you look infantile. I’ll keep to the real issues.

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  156. Rollo Tommasi said...

    Steve:

    "You start with a condescending hypothetical example involving apples and bananas. Make that condescending, hypothetical and completely irrelevant. Your example uses different types of subject. Studies into the dangers of passive smoking look at one type of subject only (sometimes lung cancer cases, sometimes heart disease cases, sometimes other)."

    --------------------------------------------

    Jesus you are dense Rollo

    My example used "ripeness" as the subject. The measurement of apples and bananas represents measurements of different things in ETS studies such as self reported inhalation and cotinine levels.

    I see if I make it simple enough for a ten year old you are still too dumb to get it.

    -------------------------------------------

    Rollo Tommasi said...

    The passive smoking studies report the confidence index at 95% because that is the norm, but not the requirement.

    -------------------------------------------

    So what was your made up accusation about "rigid CI's" all about numwit?

    -----------------------------------------

    Rollo Tommasi said...

    You then quote Eysenck from the BMJ. He does indeed list a number of issues to watch with meta-analyses. But, if you read these concerns carefully, you will find that none of them deal with including studies which used different methodologies.

    -----------------------------------------

    Lol, you need to learn to read full stop.

    Did you miss these two or didn't you understand them?:-

    "the data summarised may not be homogeneous"

    "grouping different causal factors may lead to meaningless estimates of effects"

    ----------------------------------------

    Rollo Tommasi said...

    He talked about data not being homogeneous, but that is not what you and I are arguing about. So another red herring from you.

    -----------------------------------------

    LMAO, no you didn't understand them. Here's some help for you;

    "homogeneous, adjective:
    composed of parts or elements that are all of the same kind."

    Now, how the hell are you trying to twist out of that? You made up stuff in your head and argued the toss that meta analysis was good and didn't need to use the same methodology lol. You're such a dunce.

    ----------------------------------------

    Rollo Tommasi said...

    "I’ve made my position clear about your Marcia Angell (mis-)quote and the weight to be given to larger studies in meta-analyses. You and I are clearly not going to agree on this. So I’m not going to raise this any further."

    ----------------------------------------

    Lololol, you can't "raise it any further" because you got caught out talking complete BS about a subject you know nothing about.

    Nothing plus nothing equals 2 according to you lol.

    --------------------------------------------

    Rollo Tommasi said...

    You ask how weak statistical correlations can be added to make a strong one. The answer is as SCOTH concluded in 1998. The overall assessment of the evidence against Bradford-Hill’s criteria may be strong, even if it less convincing in one or two of these (in this case, strength). That is the case with passive smoking.

    ------------------------------------------

    Are you answering a different question?

    If you have differing studies that tend toward a result of 1:00, how do you add them together to get a different result?

    Your quote from Scoth, (15 people from ASH and the NRT industry plus 1 other,) is completely meaningless. All they are saying is a strong correlation can still be gained even if one or two weak correlations are included, they make no effort to explain how an entire group of weak correlation can be morphed into one strong correlation as you claimed.

    -----------------------------------------

    Rollo Tommasi said...

    Your criticism of He et al is complete nonsense. First of all, you are wrong to claim that I said all the studies accounted for all confounders. I actually said “different studies have addressed different confounders”.

    ------------------------------------------

    You are a lying scumbag that attempts to wriggle out of your own BS once you have been caught out. What you actually said was - "Yes, confounders can exist. Guess what? They’re taken into account". You never qualified that by saying you meant only some confounders were taken into account.

    As for your reworded claim that "different studies address different confounders" That is equally as bad. If they only address a few of the confouders in a given study the result at the end is wrong, adding those wrong results to another study that uses different confounders is simply adding two incorrect results together. What you are telling us now is that adding two incorrect results together makes a correct result lol.

    I really can't ever remember talking to someone so stupid Rollo. Do you even think about things before you say them?

    ------------------------------------------

    Rollo Tommasi said...

    Kawachi et al (1997), which deals with +12 confounders, including age, alcohol consumption, BMI, exercise, saturated fat intake and vitamin E intake.

    --------------------------------------------

    So it accounted for diet and exercise from my list then! (It also accounted for socio economic status but you missed that one). What about the other confounders? Are you going to tell me they don't make a difference to the result again?

    And while we are at it how scientific was this "study" Rollo? In 1982 it asked people the question - "Are you currently exposed to passive smoke at work or at home?"

    Lol, how did they confound for passive smoke exposure anywhere else? How did they quantify how much smoke someone was exposed to at work?

    So how did they account for the most important confounder for this study Rollo? misclassification bias.

    ----------------------------------------
    Rollo Tommasi said...

    Kawachi et al (1997

    Others (e.g. Steenland et al (1996)) cover level of education.

    -----------------------------------------

    Lol, another study that couldn't account for misclassification bias. It used a questionnaire that asked people how many vegetables they had eaten during the past year and asked people how many cigarettes their spouse smoked so they could guess at passive smoke exposure.

    -------------------------------------------

    Rollo Tommasi said...

    In short, what you describe as the “biggies” are all accounted for in at least some of the studies.

    ------------------------------------------

    And you really can't see the problem with what you have just said? lol, you are embarrassingly stupid.

    The fact that statistical analysis includes correction for confounders shows the need to do so (despite your earlier made up dribble that they don't make any difference)

    So if a study accounts for only "some" of the confounders and ignores the rest what does that do to the result? That's right Einstein, it makes it artificially high.

    Now to take that further, you want to take that inaccurate result and add it to other inaccurate results to make it better lol.

    In simple terms (so you can understand), if there are 2 people in one room and 3 people in another there are 5 people in total. But you have inaccurate figures that say there are 4 people and 6 people in the rooms so you add them together to make 10 people in total.

    Now tell me again lol how adding this junk together makes it better lol?

    -------------------------------------------

    Rollo Tommasi said...

    "You described He et al as “an anti smoking meta analysis, the king of all junk”, based on your wrongful claims. Would you care to re-appraise your opinion of this study?"

    -------------------------------------------

    Actually, seeing as your "invented on the spot" laws of statistical analysis wouldn't fool a ten year old with a CSE in colouring in, I would like to restate it.

    He et al, is an anti smoking meta analysis, the king of all junk science.

    As for your other meta analysis;

    If the control group is no different to the case group what are you comparing Rollo? The fact that they found 60% of the control group to be misclassified doesn't account for the other 40% that were deluded enough to believe that they have not been exposed to passive smoke.

    Where have all these people been living, on the moon?

    You never did answer this fundamental flaw in the methodology of these studies.

    Who are passive smokers x% more likely to get disease than Rollo?

    Where did they find adequate sample sizes of non passive smokers? Where would you look to find someone who has never been in a pub, restaurant, cafe, friends house, workplace.

    The very fact that they found 60% of the control group to be lying or deluded shows that it is impossible.

    It doesn't "lower the RR" at all numbskull because if they didn't account for the discovered misclassification bias it completely nullifies the results. And how did they account for the bias in the 40% they didn't happen to catch out at lying or delusion?

    ----------------------------------------
    Rollo Tommasi said...

    "Your comments about “lifetime exposures” show the ludicrous nature of your position beyond all doubt. The logical conclusion of your position is that passive smoking should not be accepted as a health risk until confirmed by a 50 year long cohort study. That’s absolutely ridiculous, when the evidence of people dying from passive smoking is real now."

    -------------------------------------------

    What are you talking about? I never said anything of the sort, you are just making stuff up as usual.

    Firstly your illusion that "people dying from passive smoke is real now" is not supported by any evidence anywhere. There are no in vivo biological assays that demonstrate it and no-one has been able to identify a single constituent of smoke that would be capable of producing that effect. All you have is weak statistical correlation from flawed and biased studies that rely on guesses of exposure. 92% of which show no risk anyway.

    What I am actually saying is that Nazi anti smoking studies cannot justifiably claim that it takes 50 years to develop the diseases in an effort to explain why many of the disease are still rising 50 years after smoking started to decline. While at the same time they don't account for exposure to other things up to 50 years ago so they can claim passive smoke is the culprit.

    By their own words it takes up to 50 years after exposure so what does data on a persons self "guessed" exposure to only one factor for the past two years give you?

    You are a fascist that promotes Nazi style junk science.

    -------------------------------------------

    Rollo Tommasi said...

    "Final confirmation of the hypocrisy of your argument comes when you mention radon gas. You obviously accept the danger that radon causes to health. But that risk has been established using the very same epidemiological methods as for passive smoking, with the very same limitations. Strange how you should be prepared to live with the limitations for the one (radon) but not the other (passive smoking)."

    ------------------------------------------

    Jesus you are thick!

    The "hypocrisy" lies purely with the Nazi's. I never claimed that radon studies were "good" I pointed out that the EPA claims it causes 14% of lung cancer. Are you now saying that the ETS studies don't take this into account in their "smoking causes claims" because they know that epidemiology cannot demonstrate causation?

    They can't have it both ways. (outside of the fascist land you live in).

    If they claim ETS epidemiology is good they can't claim Radon epidemiology is bad in order to ignore it.

    ----------------------------------------

    Rollo Tommasi said...

    You keep with the abuse and offensive Nazi references if you want. All they do is make you look infantile. I’ll keep to the real issues.

    -----------------------------------------

    LOL @ the real issues. By that you mean the fascist propaganda you vomit.

    How exactly would you describe a person who seeks to control the lifestyle choices of others for their own good?

    What exactly is a person who promotes a law forbidding an adult from making their own choice about their exposure to a legal product?

    You're fascist scum full stop and the more you try to force your Nazi ideology down people's throats for their own good the more you show yourself up for what you really are.

    A Nazi who regurgitates junk science, pretends he knows what he is talking about, fails to admit his glaring mathematical blunders, advocates forcing adults by law to conform to his ideology, twists arguments, avoids questions and makes things up in his head such as saying that adding dissimilar and weak studies together makes them strong.

    The cap fits Nazi boy!

    ReplyDelete
  157. "Rich – De Flora et al (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12628522). They actually used Swiss albino mice as well as strain A/J. And, while I have reservations about animal experimentation generally, for the purposes of research there is nothing about using strain A/J mice which inherently makes the results invalid. Those mice are simply more susceptible to risk factors which existed anyway – no smoke without fire.

    But my bigger point is about animal experimentation generally. Whatever the ethical rights and wrongs, scientists have still not been able to simulate passive smoking conditions for humans in an accurate way for animals in these experiments. So the results of these experiments – both positive and negative – should be read with caution."

    You're right, they haven't simulated it realistically - but they have done very unrealistic testing. I disagree, there is smoke without fire. You see, if you use animals genetically susceptible to develop lung cancer then the results cannot conclude tobacco smoke caused it. It is invalid because it is an unjust conclusion - it goes to what Lord Nimmo said in the McTear said: to paraphrase in the context, if an animal is likely to get cancer regardless then there's no way of concluding smoking is the definite cause. The only way to conclude such a thing would be to use 'normal' animals taking into account other variables. Oh wait, they did that many many times......and found tobacco smoke innocent

    ReplyDelete
  158. Also Rollo, as you've provided a link to the de Flora study i have a few comments. There is no denying this is not objective research.

    1) Very first sentence: "The epidemic of lung cancer and the increase of other tumours and chronic degenerative diseases associated with tobacco smoking have represented one of the most dramatic catastrophes of the 20th century"

    There is no epidemic of lung cancer, nor has there ever been. According to CRUK there are 34,150 LC deaths per annum, or 22% of all cancer deaths. According to statistics. gov (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=952) there were "504,052 deaths registered in England and Wales in 2007". Despite all the attention smoking and lung cancer get, there really is not an epidemic.

    2) "The control of this plague is one of the major challenges of preventive medicine for the next decades. The imperative goal is to refrain from smoking. However, chemoprevention by dietary and/or pharmacological agents provides a complementary strategy, which can be targeted not only to current smokers but also to former smokers and passive smokers"

    And de Flora isn't on the Big Pharma payroll? At the start of the page we're told that they consider smoking a social plague that needs to be stopped and pharmaceutical products can help. Objective....

    3) "We are working to develop an animal model for the induction of lung tumours following exposure to cigarette smoke. The most encouraging results were so far obtained in models using A/J mice and Swiss albino mice."

    working towards inducing lung cancers.... note the language. Not working towards studying tobacco smoke on lungs or development of cancer, but working towards actively inducing it. That means intentionally creating lung cancer to say smoking caused it.

    4) "The agents tested in vivo included N-acetyl-L-cysteine, 1,2-dithiole-3-thione, oltipraz, phenethyl isothiocyanate, 5,6-benzoflavone, and sulindac."

    This is clever wording, and deliberately coy. Are these tobacco smoke agents they're using? If so, in what quantities? They don't appear to tell us. It is not exactly good science to say 'hmm, that appears in smoke, let's extract it and use it to cause cancer' because it is not a valid production. You see, when chemicals and compounds mix together their attributes can change. For example, tobacco smoke actually contains anticarcinogens, things which inhibit cancer, so if you take out a potent carcinogen and increase the dosage by an unspecified amount as well as removing the anticarcinogen then you cannot claim it proves smoking causes cancer. Professor Schrauzer, President of the International Association of Bio-inorganic Chemists, actually testified before a United States congressional committee in 1982 that scientists had known for a long that there were certain constituents of tobacco smoke that act as anti-carcinogens (they work to prevent cancer, as opposed to carcinogens which cause it) in test animals. He went on to say that when known carcinogens are applied to the animals the application of constituents of cigarette smoke counter them. He continued further, testifying on oath to the committee, that “no ingredient of cigarette smoke has been shown to cause human lung cancer” and “no-one has been able to produce lung cancer in laboratory animals from smoking.”

    5) And here's the real cruncher: "We are trying to develop a pharmacogenomic approach, e.g. based on genetic metabolic polymorphisms, aimed at predicting not only the risk of developing cancer but also the individual responsiveness to chemopreventive agents."

    Oops! The cat is truly out of the bag. In other words, 'we love Big Pharma and are actively working on a way to promote their products'. NOT valid researching Rollo

    ReplyDelete
  159. A couple of things
    Rollo: ". The passive smoking studies report the confidence index at 95% because that is the norm, but not the requirement."

    I assume you mean interval here? What does this interval represent? My understanding is that at 95% this means that there is 1/20 chance the result was random. Expanding this to 90% would mean a 1/10 chance of the result appearing to be random. Even the 95% level is nowhere near certainty and to expand to 90% gives even greater lattitude. So the widening of the interval for a small effect can place more importance on the result than it deserves and leaves open the possibility that the null hypothesis is included.

    Confidence here is not the same as the Credible Interval. This is important because the confidence interval gives a range of values which may (or even may not) include the correct value.

    Credible interval means the correct value is within the range, a cofidence interval relates to the probability that the value lies within that range.

    You are correct in saying that a CI of 95% it is not required, yet using a wider value (90% for example) can be misleading and if everyone else is using 95%, very misleading.
    -----------------------------------------------
    Rollo:
    "Your comments about “lifetime exposures” show the ludicrous nature of your position beyond all doubt. The logical conclusion of your position is that passive smoking should not be accepted as a health risk until confirmed by a 50 year long cohort study. That’s absolutely ridiculous, when the evidence of people dying from passive smoking is real now."

    Two things here and a return to meta-analysis.

    Can you give a link to the "evidence of people dying from passive smoking"

    There maybe a weak association between Passive smoking and people dying. You argue that SCOTH weighed the evidence and came to the conclusion that it was causal.

    west
    ----
    --- Continued -->

    ReplyDelete
  160. --- from previous ---
    Meta-analysis

    Yet the evidence from primary smoking is inconclusive even for association. They seemed to overlook this. Why is the LC rate lower in countries that have higher rates of smoking than the UK? Explanations such as indoor open fire cooking have been used to explain this. (As Hackshaw et al used to remove a study from their analysis). A similar argument could be applied in the UK with repect to pollution levels etc.

    If D is the resulting observation. S1 is second hand smoke and C2, C3 are potential other causes. (Confounders if you like)

    Study 1 has S1 and C2 present
    Study 2 has S1 and C3 present
    Study 3 has S1 and C2 & C3 are present

    Now if we put these together in a meta-analysis we find that S1 (being consistent through out) shines through as Study 3 might be rejected because of an apparent spurious result. Yet it maybe C2 & C3 together are causal and the amounts individually are not enough. So it could be the study that showed the 'correct' result is rejected. Possibly with the statement "This study suggested an implausible protective effect from exposure to environmental tobacco smoke " This gives a simple example of where meta-analysis must be treated with caution and confounders need to be understood. It is not good enough that studies individualy account for them. If C2 & C3 are present together in the UK and not in another country this could explain the differences.

    It is of course much more complicated than that. It must be borne in mind that the risks found are very small, which is why (although SCOTH weighed the evidence) the comment by SCOTH that the Strength criteria (from B-H) is not met is very worrying.

    west
    ----

    --- coontinued -->

    ReplyDelete
  161. --- from previous ---
    Lifetime Risk.

    It needs to be remembered that these studies were looking at lifetime risks and still produced only a weak association.

    I agree with you that it is not possible to do a study that focuses Cradle to Grave on SHS, but your suggestion is not necessary, there is something else to think about.

    If you look at primary smoking you find that many organisations say there are benefits to giving up. One example is "[after giving up smoking for] 15 years [the] Risk of heart attack falls to the same level as someone who has never smoked " from Patient UK.

    This would suggest that repeated (or chronic) exposure to primary smoking is required to maintain the risk level.

    What about SHS? The studies found a small risk in Chronic exposure. Imagine a non-smoker goes to a pub and is 'exposed' and then goes home and is not-exposed. My question from this is "what is the risk recovery rate for a non-smoker?"

    west
    ----

    ReplyDelete
  162. Rollo,
    No, I am not suggesting that an independent SCOTH might identify a confounder which to date is unknown, this would be outside a reasonable remit for such a body.
    I am suggesting that the public can not have confidence that the current SCOTH will exhaust all lines of scientific enquiry in the currently available pool of data because it is composed of people who are committed to tobacco control. There is a high degree of probability that such people are already convinced of the harm theory of tobacco and human health and that this would lead them to over look existing confounders because they do not fit with the harm theory. They are human after all. The point I was making about HPV was that there is a chance that it is an existing confounder for lung cancer. People who smoke are more likely to get HPV/LC than people who don't. And that people who spend a lot of time with people who smoke are more likely to get HPV/LC than people who spend very little time with people who smoke.
    So has the current SCOTH even looked at the HPV/LC as a confounder? Has it decided it is not important, if so why, what was its reasons? Would an independent SCOTH come to a different conclusion? Look at it this way, if you are confident that SCOTH in it's current format would reach the same conclusions regardless of it's composition, then the public should have nothing to fear of it's conclusions when tobacco control is eventually expunged from SCOTH.

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19019488

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11076670

    ReplyDelete
  163. How statistics can be tricky: In a 1978 paper (“Smoking and lung cancer: the problem of inferring cause” J. Royal Statistical Society ) Burch, a professor of Medical Physics at the University of Leeds (a non-smoker, whose principal life work was an attempt to develop a unified theory of cancer), looked at Doll's British Doctor's study and showed that Doll had simply compared the lung cancer death rates among the doctors with the lung cancer death rates for the entire British male population. Accordingly, Burch re-plotted the data to compare the doctors with other doctors and showed that actually the risk for lung cancer amongst doctors had increased by 31% - not decreased as Doll reported.

    Burch also looked at the incubation theory that the anti's love to talk about, saying the lung cancer rates rose so many years after smoking rates rose. His work refutes this, too, as he plotted lung cancer rates for males in 1906-1926, and female rates for 1936 to 1966 and showed that the two graph lines were entirely dissimilar – whereas they would be synchronous if the incubation theory was true.

    I apologise for saying Burch criticised the 1964 Report, it was Brownlee, a prominent statistician from the University of Chicago, in "A Review of "Smoking and Health"

    ReplyDelete
  164. Rich,
    I don't know if you have ever seen this CPS II graph on smoking cessation, see slide 11.

    http://www.ash.org.uk/files/presentations/ASH_5.ppt

    I think in the context of the harm theory in tobacco and human health, it is meant to demonstrate
    that smoking cessation causes reduced risk, and this is attributable to less tobacco smoke!?! There are two things that dispute the harm theory in this relational diagram. The first is the suggestion that it's a good idea to smoke until the age of 50 and then stop – a protective effect, see niacin and p53 expression. The second is the fact that at aged ~70 LC goes ballistic!!! But say HPV is found to be implicated in more than 25% of LC as the study I posted above suggests, it is possible that the reduced risk comes from a change in life style that comes with smoking cessation. I am only talking from my observations here , but I have noticed smoking cessation is often accompanied by other profound changes in peoples lives. When friends of mine have children they often quit smoking because they (reasonably) want to increase their chances of looking after their children by increasing their chances of survival. They think that smoking causes harm mainly because everyone else does. But bringing up children has profound life style changes that include, having less sexual partners and less human contact – hence in the HPV->LC model, smoking cessation reduces risk of LC, despite the fact that it has nothing to do with tobacco smoke!!!

    ReplyDelete
  165. Fredrik,
    I admire your train of thought. It is entirely scientific in that you look at the other confounders rather than taking correlation as causation. Something I've long been saying is that smoking is often accompanied by unhealthy lifestyle choices, and vice versa - as someone once said to me: "if smokers accept smoking is bad for them, they're unlikely to strive to be optimally healthy with other things".

    You're right, smoking cessation is often accompanied by exercise and an improved diet. Something else interesting about that slide is they say even smoking at 60 has lower risks - conveniently ignoring that, even in non-smokers, the average age of lung cancer is about 68. So what does that tell us? That smokers develop lung cancer at the same age as non-smokers! Hardly a causation then really.... Although they're so obviously unscientific too, because they must be working from the assumption all smokers start at the same age. I mean, they can't claim quitting at 35 eliminates so much risk, because if we assume the risk does exist and someone starts at 12 and someone else at 22 then their risks won't be the same.

    I also like slide 1 where they admit risks are dose dependent - even though they say there's no safe level of SHS - how bizarre.

    ReplyDelete
  166. Rich,

    This pure,pure speculation on my part. If it turns out that HPV is implicated in the majority of lung cancer as it is now belived with
    cervical cancer, and given that HPV is a virus. Could the fact that lung cancer goes ballistic at ~70 because this is when the Thymus goes AWOL?
    It is goes from 35 grams at puberty to less than 1/2 a gram at ~70

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thymus#Embryology

    Look at this study:


    "http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1538287&blobtype=pdf"

    "That the lymphocyte reactivity of older smokers coincides with that of age-matched nonsmokers
    may be due to a biased selection of older smokers. Since only those in good
    health were tested
    , the sampling excludes those who develop and those who succumb to
    diseases associated with chronic cigarette consumption, such as carcinomas of the head and
    neck region and lung."

    contrast that with the earlier statment

    "[smokers]All individuals were screened as the non-smokers."

    Another classic example of the "healthy smoker effect".

    Charming!

    ReplyDelete
  167. That's odd isn't it, that healthy smokers were tested but that isn't good enough because most smokers apparently have all manner of illnesses. What wonderfully objective research.

    HPV is a tricky one, because only about 2% or something of sufferers develop cervical cancer - it's not actually as it appears in the meda. There are many different strands of HPV and most are cleared up by the body's immune system anyway. The media would have us believe that each cancer exists as the result of somehting specific, i.e. HPV = cervical cancer, smoking = lung cancer and so forth. In reality, it's not that cut and dry and cancer is invariably the result of a weakened immune system as a result of either lifestyle choices (such as diet) and, possibly, a virus like HPV. Have you come across the works of Dr Johanna Budwig and Dr Otto Warburg? Very interesting indeed, Warburg won 2 nobel prizes for his work on cancer and identified how it exists and how it can be cured

    ReplyDelete
  168. Zitori said...
    Show me a non-smoker that is addicted to nicotine through ETS. You wont find one. Going by the propaganda, that nicotine is one of the worlds most addictive drugs, then if levels of so-called toxins in ETS are high then nicotine must be too, but no addicted non-smokers. What a surprise. A con of gigantic proportions. End of debate

    ReplyDelete
  169. http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/140/9/771

    For Rollo and other anti-smoking zealots,

    Let me open by giving a definition of
    meta-analysis, bowdlerized from a definition
    of risk analysis that appeared in the
    Wall Street Journal. I think it gets to the
    heart of the matter: "Meta-analysis begins
    with scientific studies, usually performed
    by academics or government agencies, and
    sometimes incomplete or disputed. The
    data from the studies are then run through
    computer models of bewildering complexity,
    which produce results of implausible
    precision" -Dr. Shapiro

    I cannot think of a
    better empirical demonstration of the futility
    of meta-analysis than this example.

    I propose that the
    meta-analysis of published nonexperimental
    data should be abandoned. - Dr. Shapiro

    Jerry

    ReplyDelete
  170. Have your say :

    www.uksmokingban.forumotion. com

    ReplyDelete
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    ReplyDelete
  172. Eddie Douthwaite15 March 2010 at 11:12

    Hi Dick, Just found your live blog,I have been watching the whole thing live and it is great.Pass on my best wishes to everyone there.

    ReplyDelete