Having recently debunked the Super Bowl Sunday violence story, perhaps you could check into this secondhand smoke business. I seem to remember that after the initial study came out blaming secondhand cigarette smoke for every kind of ill, this study was found to be seriously flawed. Is this another case like the “LSD causes chromosome damage” study?
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Let me begin by saying that I’m allergic to tobacco smoke, and laws against smoking in public places have personally benefited me. In principle I don’t have a problem with banning public smoking: it’s an annoyance to nonsmokers and a danger to vulnerable folk such as asthmatics, children, and the elderly. All that having been said, the claim that “environmental tobacco smoke” (ETS) seriously threatens the health of the general public, and in particular that it causes lung cancer, is unproven at best.
There have been scores of studies on the health effects of ETS, but the one you’re probably thinking of was a 1993 report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which labeled ETS a class A carcinogen that caused approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths among adult nonsmokers per year.
Tobacco defenders claim that of four major ETS studies completed since the EPA report was released, two found no evidence that ETS increased cancer risk, one found weak evidence, and only one found strong evidence. The EPA’s take on it is that all four studies support its position. Sounds like bluff to me, but read the agency’s response and decide for yourself at www.epa.gov/iaq/pubs/strsfs.html.
