Clearing The Air

Saturday, December 09, 2006

Thought I would remind lawmakers and pro-smoking ban activists what the World Health Organization said "..secondhand smoking doesn't cause cancer..."

THE world's leading health organisation has withheld from publication a study which shows that not only might there be no link between passive smoking and lung cancer but that it could even have a protective effect.

The article goes on to state:

The findings are certain to be an embarrassment to the WHO, which has spent years and vast sums on anti-smoking and anti-tobacco campaigns. The study is one of the largest ever to look at the link between passive smoking - or environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) - and lung cancer, and had been eagerly awaited by medical experts and campaigning groups.

Yet the scientists have found that there was no statistical evidence that passive smoking caused lung cancer. The research compared 650 lung cancer patients with 1,542 healthy people. It looked at people who were married to smokers, worked with smokers, both worked and were married to smokers, and those who grew up with smokers.

The results are consistent with their being no additional risk for a person living or working with a smoker and could be consistent with passive smoke having a protective effect against lung cancer. The summary, seen by The Telegraph, also states: "There was no association between lung cancer risk and ETS exposure during childhood."

Keep in mind this study was conducted when the were many more smokers, so presumably the "hazards", if they existed, would have been greater than they are today.

The other thing to realize is that this study took place before pharmaceutical companies started to finance the smoking ban movement. Funding smoking bans has been a good investment for pharmaceutical companies who manufacture alternative nicotine products like the Johnson & Johnson Co. which manufactures Nicoderm and Nicoderm CQ through its subsidiary ALZA. Johnson & Johnson does not fund smoking ban efforts directly, rather their private foundation RWJF does. RWJF's ties to the Johnson & Johnson Company can be found here and here. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) funding to smoking ban groups to influence policy changes are found here.

As I stated earlier funding smoking bans has been a good investment for pharmaceutical companies .......the proof comes from industry publications which track over the counter alternative nicotine product sales including Nicoderm and Nicoderm CQ, sales which exceed $500,000,000.00 + annually according to this report.

The facts which help explain WHO's findings of no harm, can be found in these three air quality studies which found that secondhand smoke is up to 25,000 times SAFER than OSHA air quality regulations.

Clearing the Air predicts that the hoax about secondhand smoke, perpetuated by the scare-mongers, will soon come to an end, but not before a full scale congressional investigation.