Citing the US Surgeon General, Frieden said, “There is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke. Tobacco smoke contains over 7,000 chemicals including roughly 70 that can cause cancer.”
Paracelsus: the dose is the poison.
Citing the US Surgeon General, Frieden said, “There is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke. Tobacco smoke contains over 7,000 chemicals including roughly 70 that can cause cancer.”
Paracelsus: the dose is the poison.
A more accurate statement would be that there is no measurable risk to second hand smoke at all. Or if there is, it is so small it is negligible,
This is yet another moral, ethical and intellectual abdication by scientists who should, and do, know better.
OK. Let’s take the claim at face value.
So what’s the carcinogen content of a paraffin wax, scented, aromatherapy candle?
Or a patchouli incense stick?
My suspicion’s it should be raining dead hippies & alternate therapists by now.
Once again, Sam Harris’s fireplace delusion is a good place to start: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-fireplace-delusion
Again, we are up against morality rather than rationality.
About the worst carcinogen in the home is frying with healthy, unsaturated fats, sunflower oil. It’s the same chemical process on the same material, used to make house paint. Much safer with beef dripping, if you don’t want high gloss lungs to go with your egg ‘n sausages.
Well the second sentence is definitely true, and the first sentence is strictly speaking true, as it would be for any risk that behaves as a continuous variable.
And you aren’t, really aren’t, going to get the US Surgeon General backing tolerance or threshold values based on a benefit/risk calculation for tobacco smoke. Not even because it’s an emotive thing but because you cannot have arguments like this in public. Just as it’s acceptable for a certain number of people to die for the convenience of other people driving cars but the government can’t say so in public. What do you think would happen if it came out that the government tolerates a greater than zero risk of nuclear meltdown, or sub-sea oil leaks? It simply wouldn’t do.
I wonder if the good doctor Frieden can name other poisons for which there is no safe level of exposure?
And does the U.S. Surgeon General really consider “chemicals” to be some sort of Great Satan? Really, Doctor? Really?
There’s a pub near me which has built a really smart ‘smoking lodge’ in their garden, complete with great photos of film stars looking glamorous and sexy while smoking fags.
Makes me wish I smoked.
If his statement were true, most people over the age of thirty would now be dead from lung cancer or other smoking related diseases. Of course, we are not.
The students’ union was a solid wall of smoke. Forty years later why aren’t my contemporaries keeling over? Statistical significance has to be made explicit if you’re a paid state moralist hiding behind a scientific label. If my lifetime’s risk(low for a nonsmoker) went up 2%, it was worth six years of secondhand nicotine.
If second-hand smoke was so toxic, we should never have learnt that smoking caused lung cancer which was found because non-smokers like me who grew up in a house where everyone else smoked don’t suffer the same frequency of lung cancer.
Not bullshit – propaganda.
So you add this to Global Warming, how many other areas of “scientific consensus” are in fact, complete bollocks?
When I had free access to scientific papers, I read one about Kids and Cotinine. If you smoke, cotinine can be found in all bodily fluids.
As I remember, skin swabs taken from children of smokers contained twice as much cotinine as children from non-smokers. This was alleged to prove effects of secondary smoking.
Nobody asked why samples taken from children of non-smokers contained significant cotinine. If you live in a non-smoking household and your child minder does not smoke next to the child, the cotinine cannot be a result of secondary smoking. It is coming from somewhere else.
Strangely enough, Paraclesus was not an expert on the dose-response relationship for carcinogens.
Nowadays, we know epidemiologically that dose-response for lung-cancer risk in cigarette smokers is approximately linear. We know theoretically that dose-response for mutagenic carcinogens is likely to be either linear or square-law (for mechanisms requiring damage to one or two alleles). We know of no threshold mechanism which might change this at sufficiently low doses.
Citing the U.S. Surgeon General I can therefore say with 100% certainty that if you live in any US city you will die within 2 years of lung cancer because of petrol and diesel fumes.
So the silly fucker’s wrong then, isn’t he?
So we have a toxic blend of fanatic moralists, a credulous and ignorant media which needs to excrete hysterical shit to survive on a daily basis, and a State eager to exploit both to cynically raise revenue and extend its control.
Unpleasant.
Charlie, coining can be found in all sorts of foodstuffs such as potatoes and tomatoes. Vitamin B is derived from Nicotinic Acid.
Charlie, cotinine can be found in all sorts of foodstuffs such as potatoes and tomatoes. Vitamin B is derived from Nicotinic Acid.
Medicine has a problem, and that is that it has to deal with both individuals and populations. The US Surgeon General is a doctor. By training and instinct doctors care about the person in front of them in their office, to whom population or sample data is only rather vaguely applicable. The rest of us can look at the data on passive smoking, and, I hope, pretty much agree that, short of industrial levels of exposure, there is, if anything, a barely detectable effect.
Exposing 1 person to passive smoke isn’t particularly likely to get that person the wrong side of the binary outcome disease/not disease. Exposing 1 billion people might get some of it the wrong outcome, as individuals, but not enough that we can realistically measure it against the unexposed and be reasonably convinced that the passive smoking is the cause of the difference.
So we cue the usual arguments about liberty, and other things we tolerate people doing that kill some of us (like driving cars), and so on. The really duplicitous thing, on the side of the antipassivesmokeists, warmists, and so on is not that they have a cause and want to support it, but the cherry-picking and manipulation of evidence to bolster the cause, rather than treating the somewhat ambiguous data for what it is and failure to accept that protection of the innocent is only one argument amongst many, which if applied without other considerations to their cause can also be applied against them.
Paul B:
“Nowadays, we know epidemiologically that dose-response for lung-cancer risk in cigarette smokers is approximately linear. We know theoretically that dose-response for mutagenic carcinogens is likely to be either linear or square-law (for mechanisms requiring damage to one or two alleles). We know of no threshold mechanism which might change this at sufficiently low doses.”
Horseshit. Truly the pretense of knowledge. We live in a world full of “mutagenic carcinogens” and most of them don’t manage to do anything. The idea that medical porkers can tell who will or won’t get cancer is nonsense. Smoking adds slightly to your chances–but you are gonna die of something whatever you do or don’t do. Thresholds your arse.
@Ecks, as inconvenient as it might be, PaulB is basically correct (bar the speculation about alleles), allowing for some correction by [insert technical word which to my shame I cannot remember], in short that really small doses of bad stuff might be good for you. Turning that into regulation of small exposures is to test the limits of science, and is rightly subject to a lot of other arguments, including the “what’s bad for you is x times good for someone else, and you do things good for you and bad for others as well”.
Of course if you smoke something else might get you, but that smoking gets people dead sooner isn’t really arguable. The argument is over whether smoking gets other people dead sooner. To which the answer is “probably yes, but not very many people”, which places it firmly in the category of things to argue over regulating, rather than the “OMG!!!! THE CHEEELDREEEEN!!!! BAAAN NOOOOOWWWW!!!!!” category.
Bloke in Germany – “PaulB is basically correct (bar the speculation about alleles), allowing for some correction by [insert technical word which to my shame I cannot remember], in short that really small doses of bad stuff might be good for you.”
Hormesis. Which is not surprising given that the body has very complicated mechanisms for dealing with and repairing damage to it. You know, triumph of evolution and all that. It is likely that the body can cope with a certain level of outrage but once it gets to a certain level, it gets too much to cope with. Which also means that small doses cause the body to divert more resources into detection and repair, which in turn means you are healthier if poisoned at low levels.
So PaulB is right if we assume the body is unable to detect, repair, and heal.
BiG: the “speculation about alleles” is the (well-established) Knudson two-hit hypothesis.
SMFS: PaulB is right if we assume the body is unable to detect, repair, and heal.
I’m also right if we assume the body is able to detect, repair and heal. It takes a whole series of mutations to create a cancerous cell: the first step is one which promotes later mutations, either by mutating a proto-oncogene or by damaging a tumour-suppressor gene. If a mutagenic carcinogen damages a tumour-suppressor gene, no amount of wishful thinking about hormesis is going to stop further mutations in the affected cell.
All very erudite. But I know that I feel better after eating an apple turnover with cream.
Now this is evolution. When I was a lad apple turnovers didn’t exist. Now I am nigh eighty they do. That is why we are living longer.
er – QED.
None of this debate would matter one whit if smokers weren’t so bl**dy selfish as to insist on imposing their filthy habit on the rest of us.
The stink, ash, cast-off dog-ends, bad-breath, cough-inducing haze and all the rest of it are enough – or would be to any anyone considerate of others – to induce smokers to restrain themselves anywhere else other than the company of other addicts confined indoors well away from the rest of us.
@PaulB, it’s relatively unusual to require mutations in both alleles of a proto-oncogene, a loss of function example notwithstanding.
Geoff. I see where you are coming from. Substitute the words “Jew”, “Nigger”, “Queer”, “Muslim”, “Dyke” for “smoker and we see the mindset of the vehement anti-smoker.
@GeoffH – to induce smokers to restrain themselves anywhere else other than the company of other addicts confined indoors well away from the rest of us.
Which is exactly what a lot of them did in pubs before the smoking ban. Smoking in pubs also has the highly adavantageous side effect that sanctimonious sensitively nostrilled gits like you wont be there to spoil my enjoyment.
Henry.
Lazy riposte. You can smoke all you wish. If you want to look, smell and taste like a over-full ashtray that’s your business. Just don’t do it in my company and the company of those who don’t share your addiction.
Ian.
Again, lazy riposte.
You want a smokers-only pub? As far as I am concerned you can have ’em. Just not all pubs. Yours wouldn’t last very long. Then you can be thrown away with all the dog-ends.
Neither of you seem to grasp the concept that to be in company of others, the majority of whom will not share your disgusting habit, requires only that you restrain yourself from lighting up while with them.
But, it seems you can’t so you are the selfish, arrogant, idiot addicts all along.
@GeoffH it’s almost impossible to know where to start, the level of ignorance on display in your post is so deep you could fill the Mariana trench with it. For starters no-one is proposing that pubs be smokers only, just that smoking be allowed in them. There is a mechanism for testing out how long this would last, Tim has mentioned it ocassionally it is called the market. The decline in the pub in recent times has coincided with the banning of smoking in such places, correlation is not causation obviously, but the evidence is far stronger than that linking second hand smoke to cancer.
I apologise for any second hand hate in this reply, but being exposed to such high levels of first hand hate in your earlier posts has obviously had an effect.
“You want a smokers-only pub? As far as I am concerned you can have ‘em.”
But you can’t, that’s the point, it’s banned.
And why smokers-only. If I, as a non smoker, want to go into a pub that allows smoking, why should I be banned from that.
The real stink here is fascist crap, whatever you may think. If you left it to landlords, it would sort itself out.
Geoff, you’re 100% wrong on your “company of others” stuff.
Group of friends go out for a drink, pre the fascist crap.
Pubs regularly had both a smoking bar or non smoking bar – which bar was always a negotiation between consenting adults, and depended on the make up of the group. No one ever “forced” the non smoker into the smoking bar.
Now the fascists have decided that we are all to be “protected”. Pure crap – sorry for keep using that word, but that’s simply what it is.
“and” non smoking bar.. always re-read!
GeoffH, I hope you don’t masturbate. There are some people who consider that to be vile and disgusting.
How hateful you are. You would segregate people who do stuff you don’t like away from everyone else. Or is it that they just stay away from you? I would be more than happy to stay away from such a self – righteous prig. I bet parties at your house are a right laugh.
No PF, Henry and Ian,
It’s you that don’t get it. You are displaying the arrogant tosspottery of the smoker who insists on befouling everyone else, willing or unwilling.
Since you won’t respect others, then you can’t complain about being ‘sent to Coventry’.
Your problem, not mine.
Sorry Geoff but you’re an idiot. In that – you’re not capable of arguing the issue, so you resort to accusing others of tosspottery. Hmmm…
As I said, and you can’t be arsed to read, I’m not even a smoker – I just despise crap imposed by dirty fascists.
‘sent to Coventry’ – you know, you really are quite “special”..:)
@ GeoffH
As a life-long non-smoker, I was, like PF, quite happy to visit either bar. I do not share Henry’s addiction but ifhe is a friend of a friend (don’t know he might be) he is welcome to smoke in my presence.
You are behaving like a stalinist (not a fascist, they weren’t as bad) in telling Henry Crun he may not smoke in my company. Your attitude stinks worse than a million stale gag-ends.
There used to be an Austrian chap who also was vehemently anti-smoking. In the end he retreated to an underground bunker and topped himself. I feel sorry for anti-smokers. If smoking was banned they would have to find something else to hate just to give their pathetic little lives some meaning.
Your all just like Hitler.