Clearing The Air

Friday, December 02, 2005

MPAAT & Science are two words you'll never see in the same sentence together.....aside from here.

MPAAT was caught lying here, with this woman deceiving the public about having cancer to serve their agenda. MPAAT is lying when they claim, with authority, that 38,000 people die every year from secondhand smoke, not one single person has ever been documented as dying from secondhand smoke. But they continue to air their lies on radio & TV because of the tobacco settlement money......money that was supposed to be spent educating smokers to quit smoking voluntarily........not spent influencing or lobbying for government mandated smoking bans.

Here is an interesting factoid in this 2004 MPAAT document page 6 to the Minnesota legislature & Ramsey district court, it states as per the MN Department of Health:
One in every seven deaths in Minnesota (5,600 deaths a year) is attributable to smoking. Which slightly contradicts what the Cancer Society says.

The American Cancer Society states: In Minnesota, more than 2,620 people are diagnosed with lung cancer each year and 2,480 people die from it, the American Cancer Society said.

And yet now MPAAT is trying to tell us 38,000 non-smokers per year die of secondhand smoke......Apparently to exaggerate their point, now more non-smokers die of secondhand smoke than smokers die from smoking. Hmmm something tells me MPAAT & the pro-smoking ban activists will stop at nothing to pass their agenda.....lies and unethical behavior is acceptable.

Pro-smoking ban groups lied about the harm to businesses, currently there are 58 Hennepin & Ramsey establishments closed since the smoking ban took effect April 2005 this year. So, now that MPAAT has been exposed for their lies & deceitful practice I hope the lawyers who file lawsuits on behalf of small business owners & employees who've lost everything remember to include MPAAT as a responsible party.

Finally, I cannot mention MPAAT without touching on the latest tool being used, the Heather Crowe story. You've probably heard the ads a 60 year old waitress, who worked 40 years in a smoking restaurant most of the time by her own admission working 20 hour days. Heather is not a typical restaurant worker. Where is the concern for the factory welder who worked 30 years in a welding smoke atmosphere and dies of respiratory failure......some might say after 30 years surely he knew what he was exposing himself to, well the same can be said of Heather 40 years in a restaurant makes her story very atypical. Further, Heather states she is dying of lung cancer but, she is currently in remission, and may not die from her lung cancer at all, despite having allegedly been told that she had no more than a year to live. That was nearly 3 years ago when her story first broke.

And so that brings me back to the reason 38,000 people aren't dying of exposure to secondhand smoke. The science and air quality testing of secondhand smoke shows that it is not possible, in fact secondhand smoke levels in smoking bars & restaurants is 500 - 15 times safer than OSHA regulations. Meanwhile, the pro-smoking ban activists most funded by Nicoderm interests, or tobacco settlement money like MPAAT, who by their own charter have to spend that money "educating" the public, will stop at nothing, even gross exaggerations and outright lies, to force their agenda on everyone.

Since some people seem to have difficulty in seeing the importance of comparing the St. Louis Park Environmental Health Department secondhand smoke air quality test results to the OSHA guidelines, here it is side by side:

click to enlarge the table above (1 milligram mg = 1,000 micrograms ug)

click to enlarge

The upper table is the actual OSHA permissible exposure limit table for airborne contaminants ie. these levels are the safe exposure limits for humans. You'll note that the nicotine* safe level is 0.5 milligrams mg / cu. M (or 500 micrograms (ug) / cu. M).

The bottom table is the actual St. Louis Park test results for 19 establishments of measured airborne nicotine* levels during busy evenings. You can see the median establishment, Applebees, had a reading of 3.3 micrograms ug / cu. M.

500 ug (OSHA safe level) divided by 3.3 ug (median reading Applebees) = measured airborne nicotine* levels are 152 times safer than OSHA regulations ie. NO HEALTH HAZARD. It is therefore impossible to implement smoking bans based on the argument that secondhand smoke is a health hazard, that argument has been scientifically proven false.

* (As per air quality researchers) Nicotine is the only unique or "trace" chemical in secondhand smoke. If you measured for formaldehyde, the carpet and other interior sources of formaldehyde would corrupt the test result, formaldehyde is formed naturally in our atmosphere due to photochemical oxidation. Benzene is given off from burning foods in the kitchen or diesel exhaust outdoors so again a false reading would be obtained. Therefore, nicotine is the ideal chemical to measure for to determine secondhand smoke concentrations in the air. And then our comparison to OSHA guidelines is the logical manner in which to determine if secondhand smoke levels pose a health hazard, as you can see, they do not. If you wanted you could measure every airborne chemical in secondhand smoke and then also compare them to OSHA guidelines for that specific chemical, the results would be the same.

Smoking cigarettes can be hazardous to the smoker, no argument there. However, secondhand smoke is not hazardous to anyone, except of course to those who rely on Nicoderm interests for further funding, and those organizations, which by their charter, must spend the tobacco settlement money.