Second Hand Smoke is Harmless

[lapis]

(Yes, this is a long post, and it had to become a two-parter. If you don't care skip the part called "statistical evidence". The topic title should be "Second Hand Smoke is Harmless Or Immeasurably Harmful" by the way, but that exceeded the character limit)

This topic is not about smoking bans, for which we already have a topic apparently, but rather about the root of the problem: the "dangers" of second hand smoke. The main argument for a smoking ban in bars and restaurants is to protect the customers and the employees in particular from ETS (Environmental Tobacco Smoke) exposure, which allegedly increases the risk of suffering from lung cancer or coronary heart diseases later on in life. Now everyone knows that smoking is potentially harmful to one's health, but the question is whether or not inhaling the smoke of others has the same results.

The theory is simple: tobacco smoke contains particles which can cause cancer in humans, called carcinogens, and both the smoker and the passive smoker are exposed to these particles. One might wonder however whether these exposures are roughly the same or completely different. The biggest study on the subject, done by Covance Laboratories, measured the extent to which non-smokers were exposed to ETS particles at their home which they shared with a smoker or in a smoking workplace. The result: Median annual exposure in smoking homes and workplaces equates to less than 4 cigarette equivalents per year (The results of the study can alternatively be found here, but this particular website requires that your web browser supports Korean characters). The exposure of the 90th percentile was no more than 15 cigarette equivalents annually, the extreme outliers are not mentioned in the abstract but they're generally removed from datasets and could be due to measuring errors or a poorly functioning air conditioning system for example. The vast majority inhales negligible doses however.

Now we know that the correlational relationship between cigarette consumption and lung cancer risk is linear, which leaves us with a few possibilities about the risks of passive smoking:

- The increased risk is as negligible as the ETS particle exposure.
- Like with cadmium and lead, ETS carcinogens are harmless until you hit a MAC-value.
- Like with antibiotics, low ETS exposure improves the immunity system.

We can at least safely conclude that a measurable increased risk seems very unlikely using the theories we have now, so the hypothesis that second hand smoke is dangerous due to ETS particle exposure seems weak at best. When we have a solid hypothesis we collect empirical data to falsify our hypothesis and when we have no hypothesis it is rather unusual to start with statistical analysis anyway. But the results of the Covance study weren't released until 1998, and a lot of epidemiological studies predate that point in time. But even the statistical evidence is weak.

Statistical Evidence

1998 was not only an important year because of the Covance ETS particle exposure study, but also because it was the year in which a federal American court ruled against the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, basically calling it's 1993 study in which it claimed second hand smoke was dangerous a piece of junk. It was this study which started the wave of public smoking bans we've seen in the past decade. There have been a lot of epidemiological studies in the past few decades about the relative risk caused by passive smoking. More information about the studies in this list can be found by doing a Google search for "<name of the author>" and "ETS".

The dangers are measured using relative risk, meaning that the researchers use two samples from separate groups and compare the number of people they find with a certain affliction. If you find three people with lung cancer in the "exposed to ETS" group and two in the "not exposed to ETS" group, then the relative risk is 1.5. Since we're using a random sample rather than the entire human population, we're facing a certain degree of variance, so we estimate a confidence interval (CI), a 95% CI is the scientific standard. The CI indicates that the probability that the real relative risk is lower than the lower bound is 2.5% and the probability that the real relative risk is higher than the upper bound is 2.5%. If the CI contains 1.0, then the results of the study are called insignificant, even if the found relative risk is higher than 1.0, and since we're trying to prove that second hand smoke is dangerous we’re only interested in significant results.

[lapis]

Since the number of participants in epidemiological study is usually low, we cannot be certain that they are representative for the entire world population. A general rule of thumb is as follows: the lower bound of the confidence interval must be at least three (third page) for the study to be taken seriously. Now if we look at the list mentioned earlier we can see that most of the listed studies cannot even give significant conclusions, let alone reach a lower bound of the CI of at least 3. Some even found a mean below 1.0, meaning that people who are exposed to ETS are less likely to suffer from lung cancer, the biggest one being the one by Wu-Williams in 1990. If we have a lot of studies with a mean above 1.0 which aren't statistically significant, we can perform a so-called meta-analysis which combines a few studies with the intent of reducing variance and hopefully making the results significant. The main problem with meta-analyses however is bias; if we intentionally ignore studies which found a mean lower than or very close to 1.0 we skew the outcomes of the analysis. This might sound paranoid, but J B Copas and J Q Shi already reduced the relative risk found in a meta-analysis by Hackshaw from 1.24 to 1.15 simply by including more studies.

The EPA used such a meta-analysis combining 11 studies, but their results were not significant at the 95% level, so they lowered their standards to the 90% level, an action which is generally frowned upon in the scientific community and which was one of the main reasons why their results were discarded by the US general court in 1998. This corresponds with a WHO meta-analysis from 1998, which also couldn't give statistically significant results, but the WHO also decided to drop the entire concept of statistical significance, which resulted in articles like these (this particular article only says "small", but they failed to note that the results were too small to be significant). Skeptics saw it through however, like in this article which appeared in the British Telegraph. More can be read in this article which appeared in the Washington Times, it pretty much sums up what I’m trying to get across anyway.

One could also read this article which came to an insignificant conclusion about lung cancer and a conclusion below the general limit of three for coronary heart diseases. This meta-analysis found a lower CI bound of 0.9, not significant either. One of their studies also found a relative risk below 1, showing how poorly generalisable these studies are.

Conclusions

Do we have a solid hypothesis? No. Do we have empirical data and corresponding statistical analyses to support the already weak hypothesis? No. So, following Michael Fumento, we can come to the conclusion that the dangers of second hand smoke are immeasurably tiny or non-existent. Now do a random search on the internet for the dangers of second hand smoke: odds are you'll find a health site which claims the exact opposite of what I tried to establish in this post.

Example 1:
("Second-hand smoke releases the same 4,000 chemicals as smoke that is directly inhaled, but in even greater quantity", yeah right, plus they give no sources)

Example 2:
(First of all, they give the EPA as one of their sources, and once again they say: "Environmental Tobacco Smoke contains at least 250 chemicals known to be toxic or cause cancer. Unfortunately, the general public’s exposure to secondhand smoke is much higher than most people realize", which is just plain not true)

My question is: why are all these medical websites sticking to the story that ETS causes serious harm? Since it's their field of work, this is something they all should know about. The belief that second hand smoke is dangerous has been very commonly accepted in the past decade and maybe they're just doing their best to conform. And although I can understand why they want people to stop smoking, which might explain why they're keeping up the illusion that smokers are no better than common murderers, they're still giving incorrect conclusions. They could just as well write in their articles that God kills a kitten every time someone lights a cigarette.

Smoking is dangerous to the smoker, yes. It is very unpleasant to asthmatics and people with similar diseases, sure, but lethal to others? I don't buy it. Something that pisses me off the most can be best shown by using the words of another poster on the Newgrounds BBS: "smokers are like suicide bombers: you don’t just kill yourself but everyone around you". Now I don't blame him, but the myriad of websites that present the dangers of second hand smoke as cold, hard facts. Maybe it sucks for them to admit that they falsely jumped on the EPA bandwagon back in the early nineties, but they're deliberately lying to the general public in my opinion. And it needs to stop.

[Trendwhore]

First of all: lapis, you are a fucking beast! Fingercramps anyone?

Anyways, i don't think that secondhand smoke is harmless. I don't have any sources other than what my waiter/bartender friends tells me. They have horror stories about how some of the older nonsmoking colleagues are dwindling away with different kinds of illnesses that could be the result of working in a enviroment with extrem amounts of secondhandsmoke.

I saw a program on the telly yesterday, about the history of smoking( it was aired on Danish National television, which is seen as very credible), anyways it showed that within a specific group of pregnant couples, the smoking women with nonsmoking men, had less symptomes, than the nonsmoking women with smoking men!

First of all i don't have any details/sources so i doubt this will be seriously but i think it is too rash to simply state that the dangers of secondhandsmoking is nearly nonexistant, when you can see how dangerous smoking is. It is the on secondplace of preventable deaths.

Just to wrap this up:
1) I DID read your posts (obviously), but i did not go through your sources since i am only human.
2) This post probably dosen't do all your research credit, but hey, at least i responded :)
3) Where/how do i get my browser to respond to korean letters?

[HighlyIllogical]

Yes, quite an impressive series of posts, Lapis! Kudos.

But to the point:

I've heard that the EPA was overruled by court, but I didn't know the results of their study except for the fact that it said that second hand smoke isn't as bad as most people think. Interesting. I'll look into it.

I would still like to stop smoking in public places. Not only does it decrease the amount of smoking for smokers who HAVE to go to public locations, but it decreases the already low risk of injury/disease from secondhand smoke.

[Diablout]

dude u guys think that second hand smoke dosen't kill well 3 of my uncles and 2 of my aunts have died of second hand somke. there parents did though so if u think that the tests are wrong then u are very nieave and need to know what is going on first with the lives of the ones who died.

[SkyCube]

At 4/16/06 10:43 AM, Diablout wrote: dude u guys think that second hand smoke dosen't kill well 3 of my uncles and 2 of my aunts have died of second hand somke. there parents did though so if u think that the tests are wrong then u are very nieave and need to know what is going on first with the lives of the ones who died.

But can you prove they died of second hand smoke?

[JoS]

Yes because a study done by the same company that does other tests for Phillp Morris is a very unbiasex research facility when it comes to smoking studies that could have serious negative consequences. Source 1.

In that study, any cases that were extremly high were thrown out and blamed on things such as faulty air conditioning, which is infact unethical for a study to do. Also they did the study in one community, the testing apperatus was worn around the waist, and last time I checked you bretah out ouf your mouth and smoke rises, which would require an aful lot mroe smoke to fill up almost the whole room.

I also fail to see how a source from the EPA is not a valid one.

[JoS]

Oh, one more thing, it only studied second hand smoke at home? Generally a house has one, maybe two smokers? So it ignores people who work in places like bars where smoking is allowed?

[Elfer]

Look dudes, it's very simple.

It's smoke, humans were not fucking designed to breathe it. Being around it a LOT is going to cause some problems.

[RedSkunk]

My problem with this single study that you continually cite is four..fold. First, it's links to Phillip-Morris et al. Secondly, it only follows 316 people. It also flies in the face of the bulk of research before it. Finally, it appears, without reading the actual study (which I don't believe you yourself has, lapis), it was greatly flawed in taking a random sample of 316 people, regardless of where they work, whether or not their spouses or family members smoked, or any other dangers.

"Questionnaire data indicated that subjects consider bars/restaurants to be the locations where they are exposed to most ETS in their daily lives. However, 62% of these subjects considered their exposure in these locations to be 'none' or 'very low' during the monitoring period."

This study doesn't focus on people who work in the service industry, near smokers. These are people who might catch a whiff of a fag on their way to work. The study is flawed, writing a bunch of squiggly text doesn't change this.

If you could alert me to what database I might find this study under so that I could browse through, it'd be greatly appreciated. Although the abstract lets us gleam enough problems from it.

[Zen444]

You don't forget to smoke though!

[HighlyIllogical]

On the topic of smoking, what do you all think about this:

I think that the funds that tobacco companies pay the states should be used to fund anti-tobacco programs and health care for smokers who've quit, unless there's leftover funds.

Additionally, I believe that it is key for insurance companies to pay for treatments for nicotine addiction. It saves them money in the long run.

[TrickySoup]

Second hand smoke kills. I know when I'm near someone who smokes, I feel sick and start to cough. Smoking is stupid and se ond hand smoke does affect people in a harmful way no matter what false evidence you provide.

[SEXY-FETUS]

One thing with second hand smoke is it's just as much a choice to be around as smoking yourself. If you ask a smoker not to smoke around you 9/10 you'll get a polite agreement as long as you're not coming into there personal space and requesting it to be smoke free for little old you, you're not that important. If a bar allows smoking inside there will be smoke inside the polite request doesn't work here don't walk in and bitch about coming home smelling like ciggerettes.

[HighlyIllogical]

I love Connecticut-No smoking in bars or restaurants. It just stinks when you're trying to eat and some inconsiderate person lights up.

Taking that from a legal point of view-Yes, you have the right to smoke, but if it infringes on my right to eat undisturbed and have healthy lungs, then you cannot.

[SEXY-FETUS]

At 4/16/06 02:34 PM, GSgt_Liberal wrote: I love Connecticut-No smoking in bars or restaurants. It just stinks when you're trying to eat and some inconsiderate person lights up.

Taking that from a legal point of view-Yes, you have the right to smoke, but if it infringes on my right to eat undisturbed and have healthy lungs, then you cannot.

Yes, but that should also be a consideration when looking for a resteraunt. There was never any law requiring any business to allow smoking. Laws like that are infringing on the rights of many business owners and patrons, but nobody seems to care about that anymore.

[HighlyIllogical]

Again, I hate to bring this up, but there are sanitation and health standards for restaurants. Not having smoking is the same thing.

[nukechicken]

At 4/16/06 10:43 AM, Diablout wrote: dude u guys think that second hand smoke dosen't kill well 3 of my uncles and 2 of my aunts have died of second hand somke. there parents did though so if u think that the tests are wrong then u are very nieave and need to know what is going on first with the lives of the ones who died.

First off learn the English language kid. Second off prove to me died from second hand smoke Instead of the myraid of other things that could've killed them. We're not saying that Second hand smoke doesn't effect someones health but that the statistacal work by the goverment is BS and more research needs to be done.

[HighlyIllogical]

At 4/16/06 02:47 PM, nukechicken wrote:

First off learn the English language kid.

You, sir, are the epitome of the word ignorant.

[fahrenheit]

Oh, ok then. I guess all the coughing, especially while running, and broncidas(sp) I had when I was a kid and my parents smoked around me were just mental right?

[HighlyIllogical]

At 4/16/06 02:50 PM, fahrenheit- wrote: broncidas(sp)

It's bronchitis ("Bronchitis is an inflammation of the bronchi (lung airways), resulting in persistent cough that produces consideration quantities of sputum (phlegm). Bronchitis is more common in smokers and in areas with high atmospheric pollution."), I think. I would concur with your point that your symptoms were likely due to secondhand smoke.

[SEXY-FETUS]

At 4/16/06 02:42 PM, GSgt_Liberal wrote: Again, I hate to bring this up, but there are sanitation and health standards for restaurants. Not having smoking is the same thing.

I'm a fan of non-smoking in resteraunts, I live in utah we've had the clean air act for many years and it's worked out nicely. But bars and private clubs? Come on that's taking a ban too far, there is nothing but adults inside who all have a choice to smoke or not, everybody is already abusing there bodies with house music and alcohol, plus smoking and drinking go hand and hand.

[HighlyIllogical]

How is the belief that smoking and drinking go in hand relevant?

[ImmoralLibertarian]

At 4/16/06 03:01 PM, SEXY_FETUS wrote:

plus smoking and drinking go hand and hand.

That’s just a cultural thing that we need to get rid of. People have a right to go out for a drink without and get a job in a bar without being subjected to other people’s smoke.

I mean, if we look at this logically - we all know first hand smoke is a killer. We know it can cause a wide range of conditions. Second hand smoke is just first hand that’s been through some ones lungs. Now, unless our lungs absorb 100% of the dangerous chemicals from fag smoke, then second hand smoke IS dangerous.

[SEXY-FETUS]

At 4/16/06 03:09 PM, o_r_i_g_i_n_a_l wrote:

At 4/16/06 03:01 PM, SEXY_FETUS wrote:

plus smoking and drinking go hand and hand.

That’s just a cultural thing that we need to get rid of. People have a right to go out for a drink without and get a job in a bar without being subjected to other people’s smoke.

I mean, if we look at this logically - we all know first hand smoke is a killer. We know it can cause a wide range of conditions. Second hand smoke is just first hand that’s been through some ones lungs. Now, unless our lungs absorb 100% of the dangerous chemicals from fag smoke, then second hand smoke IS dangerous.

I'm not arguing that secondhand smoke isn't dangerous. However I am arguing that you do not have a right to go into a bar and expect it to be smoke free, however you do have a choice and if it's that important to you go support a local bar that chooses not to allow it. And stop whining like an annoying little bitch to get it banned and fuck the party for the rest of us.

[nukechicken]

At 4/16/06 02:49 PM, GSgt_Liberal wrote:

You, sir, are the epitome of the word ignorant.

Ignorance is bliss And I live in bliss how about you.

[ImmoralLibertarian]

At 4/16/06 03:14 PM, SEXY_FETUS wrote: I'm not arguing that secondhand smoke isn't dangerous. However I am arguing that you do not have a right to go into a bar and expect it to be smoke free,

But you have the right to go into a bar and expect it to be full of smoke?

however you do have a choice and if it's that important to you go support a local bar that chooses not to allow it.

It would be economic suicide for a bar to declare itself smoke free. Not everyone smokes, but the chances of someone smoking in your group is pretty likely. Which means you’d all head to a smoking bar.

:And stop whining like an annoying little bitch to get it banned and fuck the party for the rest of us.

75% of my population don’t smoke. So I’d say it’s the smokers that are ruining it for everyone.

Oh, and as a joint smoker I’ve been forced to go outside whenever I want a smoke, and I can tell you man, its not the end of the fucking world.

[JoS]

Wait you mean when I go out someowhere I should expect to not breath in what some exhaled when its been proven that what they are exhaling in my face can kill me.

Like someone said, maybe smokers shoudlnt expect to be able to light up everywhere they want, since they are the minority. And as was mentioned before its pretty much suicide for a bar to ban smoking if other bars are allowing it. It has to be all or nothing.

[nukechicken]

At 4/16/06 03:25 PM, JoS wrote: Wait you mean when I go out someowhere I should expect to not breath in what some exhaled when its been proven that what they are exhaling in my face can kill me.

First off It's been proven that the health effects of second hand smoke are statistacally insignifacant. And also what about the shit you breath in unknowingly breathe in everyday if you live near an big industial plant. could that possible have some unknown health risk that hasn't been seen yet.

[ImmoralLibertarian]

At 4/16/06 03:31 PM, nukechicken wrote: First off It's been proven that the health effects of second hand smoke are statistacally insignifacant. And also what about the shit you breath in unknowingly breathe in everyday if you live near an big industial plant. could that possible have some unknown health risk that hasn't been seen yet.

Great attitude there dude! We’re fucked already so what does it hurt for us to be fucked a little more?