Thursday, September 24, 2009

Second-Hand Smoke: Not So Bad, Akshully!

From BMJ, hat tip to Synthstuff:

In a paper entitled "Environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality in a prospective study of Californians, 1960-98," Researcher James E Enstrom and associate Professor Geoffrey C Kabat did what the World Health Organization was unwilling to do (how many years ago, now?) with the suppressed WHO report that said basically the same thing: say that you won't fall over dead tomorrow if somebody blows smoke in your general vicinity.
"Conclusions The results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality, although they do not rule out a small effect. The association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than generally believed."


The laws, regulations, policies and rules put in place to "protect you" from secondhand cigarrette smoke? We'll just leave them in place, because smoking is icky. And no, we will not be talking about banning cigarrettes in the USA, because we like the tax money we get from it. You, in the smoker's aquarium, keep it up!

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