04 What about the 400,000 people who are killed every year by smoking and secondhand smoke (SHS)? Where do they get those numbers from?
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This article is from the Smokers FAQ, by jdawson@netcom.com (Joe Dawson) with numerous contributions by others.
04 What about the 400,000 people who are killed every year by smoking and secondhand smoke (SHS)? Where do they get those numbers from?
A: First, a common tactic of Antismokers is to mix numbers up with each
other to make things appear as they wish. Thus, a statement about SHS
will often include the phrase "deaths from smoking and secondhand smoke"
and then go on to cite a huge number. That number is NOT derived from
actual death certificates, but from a computer program called SAMMEC,
and is largely a guesstimate of deaths among smokers from smoking itself.
The propaganda trick is making that number prominent when talking
about SHS even though it has almost nothing to do with SHS.
Second, even the discredited figures used in the EPA report relating SHS
and cancer were MUCH stronger than any evidence relating SHS to heart
disease. The EPA did not even *try* to claim such a link. The "hypothesis"
that there COULD be such a link is taken by many Antismoking activists
and publicized as an actual "finding". This allows them to magnify the
threat of SHS to a figure many times higher than even the EPA claimed.
In fairness, some recent research has begun to lend a tinge of credibility to
a link between heart disease and SHS, but there has been no official
determination that there is any basis for such a claim, and certainly no
"finding" that normal social exposure to SHS poses any such risk . Indeed,
one of the largest and most recent international studies ever done (WHO
Report 1998), actually found that children of smokers were 20% LESS
likely to get lung cancer than matched children of nonsmokers!
~~From: jdawson@netcom.com (Joe Dawson)~~
From the US Dept. of Transportation's Dec. 1989 report ...
For business passengers, flying 480 hours per year for 30 years
... the lifetime risk of premature cancer death expressed as number
of expected premature deaths per 100,000 flying cabin occupants -
Ascribable to ETS : .27
Ascribable to in-flight Cosmic Radiation: 504 (East-West flights)
Here we see that the risk from in-flight cosmic radiation is some
1867 times higher than the risk from ETS. Yet the risk from cosmic
radiation is routinely ignored, while that of ETS causes apoplexy,
hysteria and scatological comparisons.
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