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Suzy, the incentive for fraud is partially idealistic, as I pointed out in my post immediately preceding this. I would like to expand on the money issue briefly however.
If I wrote to Philip Morris, to apply for a grant on the economic effects of smoking bans, and as part of that application I wrote,
“I believe that this research will provide tobacco companies with information that can help prevent implementation of smoking bans and overturn the ones that are in place. My proposed study will contribute to PM's bottom line by providing information that will enable the adoption of free choice policies that will allow employees and customers to enjoy the freedom to smoke in their work and recreational environments."
would you approve? And when my research came out, would you defend my work by saying, "If research grants were involved, that money would have been spent no matter what the study would show."
Somehow I doubt it.
I know you do not like research that does not support your views. I do not care how you or anyone else words their research proposals.
Yet I would also doubt that you'd apply the same standards to the "Smoking bans do not hurt bar or restaurant employment" study carried out by Elizabeth Klein and associates. Here is what THAT research proposal looked like:
“We believe that this research will provide public health officials and tobacco control advocates with information that can help shape adoption and implementation of CIA policies, (NOTE: "CIA policies" in 2007 Minnesota meant "smoking bans") and prevent their repeal. ... The proposed study … will contribute to MPAAT’s overall mission by providing information that enables adoption and successful implementation of policies to protect employees and the general public from secondhand smoke exposure.”
MPAAT by the way stood for "Minnesota Partnership for Action Against Tobacco." That might help explain why the grant proposal used was in the latter form rather than the former one. You can read the full analysis at:
Suzy, you might also like to explain to people here just what happened to MPAAT, and why it was dissolved and replaced with "Clearway Minnesota."
I really do not care about the wording of research proposals, either pro ban or anti ban. I do not care about MPAAT or Clearway Minnesota. If there is something you want me to know, just tell me.
If you have actual evidence of fraud in ETS research, let us see it. Post a link. Surely someone has blown the whistle.
Suzy, I do not believe your "19 research papers" all studied enough smokers "actively smoking less than one cigarette per day" to produce that dot on your graph. If you'd like to claim they did, I will double check on that, but not this evening.
If you want to read all 19 papers, feel free to do so. Since I see no evidence of fraud, I do not need to. There were a total of 6600 "heart events" in the pooled data. That is a respectable number.
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I beg to differ. The graph you drew as representing "McFadden's Hockey Stick" most definitely does NOT represent my position. Your first graph however comes closer, with the parabolic type curve intersecting the X-axis at a point greater than zero.
I strongly suggest you get a statistician to explain to you why you are wrong. Graph # 1 shows an even greater risk at low level exposure than the original figure from the paper.
The graph must start at 1.0 on the y-axis and 0 on the x-axis. That is by definition the starting point. Graph # 1 shows the risk skyrocketing at exposure barely more than none at all!
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While I was a fervent supporter of Jimmy Carter, I have to quote Ronnie here and say "There you go again!" Conflating smoking one cigarette a day with simply "being around a light smoker" is ridiculous, and further conflating "being around a light smoker" with being in a hotel where guests might be smoking on another floor or in another wing is ridiculous, and the idea that hotel staff are "exposed to smoky rooms on an ongoing basis" is also ridiculous: As I noted before, most better class hotels don't have staff that go and consort with the guests for extended periods in their rooms, and very few hotel rooms could be considered "smoky" in any reasonable sense of the word by the time cleaning staff would be coming in to clean.
As I understand you, you believe that restaurants can be ventilated adequately so that smokers and smokers can be in adjacent rooms and the nonsmokers not smell the smoke with wait staff going back and forth between the two rooms.
But the people who design those ventilation systems say it cannot be done.
Hotel maids can safely clean rooms occupied by smokers because the smoke disappears before the maids come in to clean them.
The people who work in hotels are telling us differently. Some rooms smell so bad that smokers do not even want to stay in them.
You believe that the smoke stays in the bedrooms of smokers.
People who work in hotels tell us it gets into the bathroom vents and spreads to other rooms. That means it can go from a smoking room on one floor to non-smoking rooms on other floors. Even separate wings are connected by hallways.
Do the smokers teleport through the doors? How do you keep the smoke in the room when you open the door? How do you keep it out of the hallway? Enter and exit through a window maybe? That would be awkward if you are above the first floor.
The reason to ban smoking in hotels is there is no way to contain the smoke to a smoking room.
Let me take one particularly important and egregious example: the January 2nd New York Times article on this research. The article reserves the spotlight closing paragraph of the article to provide the obligatory listing of nasty things found in standard cigarette smoke along with descriptive phraseology (e.g. “hydrogen cyanide, found in chemical weapons; butane, which is used in lighter fluid”). It finishes with one element particularly designed to terrorize parents in today’s world, “polonium-210 (Po210), the highly radioactive carcinogen that was used to murder former Russian spy Alexander V. Litvinenko in 2006.”
After reading such an article, what decent parent would allow smoking in their home, even if their children were not present. To go beyond that, what decent parent would even allow their children to associate with children of known smokers or allow smoking granny to stop in for Christmas and irradiate their children with the offgassing of KGB murder weapons? The claims, if true, would go far beyond reducing simple in-home smoking, they would drive deep and destructive wedges into our fundamental social fabric.
Still, if true, perhaps the damage would be worth it. But are they true? Or are they the modern equivalent of the “yellow journalism” that has driven our society to irrational actions and even war in times past? I believe the latter is the truth. Since the Times chose to emphasize it in such scary terms, let’s take a look at this KGB killer highlighted in their story, the radioactive Po210.
Some elementary research tells us that the Russian was murdered by a dose thought to be about 5 millicuries while a smoker smoking a half pack of cigarettes per day ingests roughly a half picocurie of this element. At typical nonsmoker living or working would likely get roughly a hundredth of the smoker’s dose, or about 5 femtocuries per day. A millicurie is a thousand microcuries, a million nanocuries, a billion picocuries, or a trillion femtocuries.
It would take that nonsmoker a trillion days to absorb the dose that killed the Russian.
Of course that’s secondhand smoke. What about our children and this “third-hand smoke”? A reasonable estimate for the amount remaining stuck to the 10,000 square feet of walls, ceilings, furniture, floors, and draperies in a reasonably ventilated 2,000+ square foot home would almost certainly be less than 1%, but let’s assume that 1% actually does remain and spreads out over that 10,000 square feet of surface. With ten cigarettes having been smoked while the child was at school and the house then thoroughly aired out, we’d then have 1% of a half picocurie (i.e. 5 femtocuries) spread over that surface.
Let us suppose that your child has a “floor-licking fixation” and licks an entire 10 sqare feet of floor sparkly clean every day while your back is turned. That child will then have licked 1/1,000th of those 5 femtocuries into his system: 5 “attocuries.”
So, how long would it take such a child to get the “killing dose” of the murdered Russian featured in the Times?
In 1,000 days your child would have licked up 5 femtocuries.
In one million days, 5 picocuries.
In one billion days, 5 nanocuries.
In one trillion days, 5 microcuries.
It would take one quadrillion days (2.74 trillion years) for that child to absorb 5 millicuries.
Unfortunately the universe is only 10 billion years old, so the child would have to lick floors for 274 cycles of our expanding universe to match our radioactive Russian.
Of course since he’d normally excrete most of that polonium we’d have to refuse to change his diaper until the end of that period… not a very pleasant thought.
And then there’s that whole annoying fact that the half life of polonium is only 138 days, so we’d just have to ignore the laws of physics as well in justifying the Times’ comparison.
Even if someone wanted to quibble with these estimates, changing 1% to 10%, or 10 square feet to 100, or 10 cigarettes to 100 cigarettes per day… or even ALL THREE in attacking this argument… we’d STILL be talking three billion years of exposure along with a suspension of the basic laws of biology and physics.
Other elements in “third-hand smoke” might be somewhat more concentrated, but still nothing that wouldn’t demand hundred, thousands, or millions of years of assiduous tongue-licking and total constipation. Dr. Kabat’s central point, the undesirability of confusing the science around smoking with the almost superstitious concern about such nonsensical concepts as “third-hand smoke” is valid, but he doesn’t go far enough in condemning either the gullible headline-seeking media or in recognizing the degree of harm caused by researchers whose agenda is driven more by politics than by science.
Let me take one particularly important and egregious example: the January 2nd New York Times article on this research. The article reserves the spotlight closing paragraph of the article to provide the obligatory listing of nasty things found in standard cigarette smoke along with descriptive phraseology (e.g. “hydrogen cyanide, found in chemical weapons; butane, which is used in lighter fluid”). It finishes with one element particularly designed to terrorize parents in today’s world, “polonium-210 (Po210), the highly radioactive carcinogen that was used to murder former Russian spy Alexander V. Litvinenko in 2006.”
After reading such an article, what decent parent would allow smoking in their home, even if their children were not present. To go beyond that, what decent parent would even allow their children to associate with children of known smokers or allow smoking granny to stop in for Christmas and irradiate their children with the offgassing of KGB murder weapons? The claims, if true, would go far beyond reducing simple in-home smoking, they would drive deep and destructive wedges into our fundamental social fabric.
Still, if true, perhaps the damage would be worth it. But are they true? Or are they the modern equivalent of the “yellow journalism” that has driven our society to irrational actions and even war in times past? I believe the latter is the truth. Since the Times chose to emphasize it in such scary terms, let’s take a look at this KGB killer highlighted in their story, the radioactive Po210.
Some elementary research tells us that the Russian was murdered by a dose thought to be about 5 millicuries while a smoker smoking a half pack of cigarettes per day ingests roughly a half picocurie of this element. At typical nonsmoker living or working would likely get roughly a hundredth of the smoker’s dose, or about 5 femtocuries per day. A millicurie is a thousand microcuries, a million nanocuries, a billion picocuries, or a trillion femtocuries.
It would take that nonsmoker a trillion days to absorb the dose that killed the Russian.
Of course that’s secondhand smoke. What about our children and this “third-hand smoke”? A reasonable estimate for the amount remaining stuck to the 10,000 square feet of walls, ceilings, furniture, floors, and draperies in a reasonably ventilated 2,000+ square foot home would almost certainly be less than 1%, but let’s assume that 1% actually does remain and spreads out over that 10,000 square feet of surface. With ten cigarettes having been smoked while the child was at school and the house then thoroughly aired out, we’d then have 1% of a half picocurie (i.e. 5 femtocuries) spread over that surface.
Let us suppose that your child has a “floor-licking fixation” and licks an entire 10 sqare feet of floor sparkly clean every day while your back is turned. That child will then have licked 1/1,000th of those 5 femtocuries into his system: 5 “attocuries.”
So, how long would it take such a child to get the “killing dose” of the murdered Russian featured in the Times?
In 1,000 days your child would have licked up 5 femtocuries.
In one million days, 5 picocuries.
In one billion days, 5 nanocuries.
In one trillion days, 5 microcuries.
It would take one quadrillion days (2.74 trillion years) for that child to absorb 5 millicuries.
Unfortunately the universe is only 10 billion years old, so the child would have to lick floors for 274 cycles of our expanding universe to match our radioactive Russian.
Of course since he’d normally excrete most of that polonium we’d have to refuse to change his diaper until the end of that period… not a very pleasant thought.
And then there’s that whole annoying fact that the half life of polonium is only 138 days, so we’d just have to ignore the laws of physics as well in justifying the Times’ comparison.
Even if someone wanted to quibble with these estimates, changing 1% to 10%, or 10 square feet to 100, or 10 cigarettes to 100 cigarettes per day… or even ALL THREE in attacking this argument… we’d STILL be talking three billion years of exposure along with a suspension of the basic laws of biology and physics.
Other elements in “third-hand smoke” might be somewhat more concentrated, but still nothing that wouldn’t demand hundred, thousands, or millions of years of assiduous tongue-licking and total constipation. Dr. Kabat’s central point, the undesirability of confusing the science around smoking with the almost superstitious concern about such nonsensical concepts as “third-hand smoke” is valid, but he doesn’t go far enough in condemning either the gullible headline-seeking media or in recognizing the degree of harm caused by researchers whose agenda is driven more by politics than by science.
Michael J. McFadden
Pfft.
Yooperkat, I see you are buying into the propaganda. You are assuming that these chemicals which are in amount so small that they might as well be non-existent in quantities consumed by smokers follow their known toxicological properties when they come from a cigarette. They don't. They instantly become far deadlier once the cigarette is lit. Cigarettes are the literal tool of Satan and they are not bound by the laws of physics. One molecule of tobacco smoke is capable of killing a healthy adult, even though one molecule of nerve gas would fail to achieve that result because THERE ARE NO SAFE LEVELS OF SECONDHAND SMOKE.
I know you might say that anti-smoking groups and physicians are taking underwhelming epidemiological studies and studies where non-smokers did record minor changes in non-smokers that were neither serious (they would not be taken seriously if it was any other substance) nor were they long-lasting. You might say that and I will merely say the exact same things over and over again.
So, the discussion degenerates into references to Nazi Germany and vast conspiracies involving drug companies.
Given the preceding posts between you and Stillkit, the reference to police state tactics was quite appropriate, although modern antismoking methods are actually closer to East Germany's Stazi and their dependence upon informants. If you feel more comfortable with that comparison I'm content. As far as "vast conspiracies involving drug companies," it's a nice discrediting tactic, but care to point to where I outlined such "vast conspiracies"?
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This from someone who does not have the science background to recognize the sigmoid curve that represents his theory that low levels of environmental smoke do not increase the risk of heart disease. Someone who continues to misrepresent the curve that does show what the increased risks of low level exposure to ETS are.
We disagree on who is misrepresenting what Suzy. I majored in physics before creating the peace studies programs that spread to over a hundred colleges in the 70s Suzy, and I'm quite content with my curves -- of which I have more than you might expect.
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I wondered about your motivation in choosing a rat study for me to look at.
The motivation was quite clear: it was intended to show how the media can be hoodwinked into plucking the public's heartstrings with stories about innocent young mothers and their suffering infants if the researchers simply throw enough scientific gobbledeegook into the Abstract (Which, along with the press release, is pretty much all most reporters will read with any real attention at all in studies like that. It was meant to illustrate the "Fraud without actual Fraud" that is used so often by Antismokers in pushing their agenda and I think it, and your followup to it, did so quite nicely. Thank you.)
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I notice you conveniently ignored my link to the article that explained the significance of the rat article in human terms. Oh, well. That is to be expected. It is rather technical, though I did try to explain it in layman's terms.
Ignored only as a priority: your article dealt almost exclusively with far higher concentrations: As I noted in my preceding posts conflating the effects of smoking itself with the enormously lower level exposures of second and "thirdhand" smoke is a political tactic far more than a scientific approach.
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You chose the rat study, Michael. I guess just so you could make your cute comment about blue eyed babies.
And for the multiple headlines that implied it was a study that showed real findings about real mothers with real babies facing real-world exposures to real threats. ... when in reality it was not: “THS hurts infant lungs,” “THS Dangerous for Babies,” “THS dangerous to unborn babies’ lungs,” and “THS affects infant’s lungs,”; all of which led to conclusions like"
"babies (are) especially vulnerable to the effects of thirdhand smoke … The dangers of thirdhand smoke span the globe … more damaging than secondhand smoke or firsthand smoke … the alarming data clearly highlight (that) pregnant women should avoid homes and other places where thirdhand smoke is likely to be found to protect their unborn children against the potential damage these toxins can cause to the developing infants' lungs."
All from chopping up those little rat lungs after soaking them in concentrated solutions of chemicals that seem to only really pop up when people smoke in homes pumped full of 15x the normal levels of nitrous acid.
The title of your chosen article, "Life-long Programming Implications of Exposure to Tobacco Smoking and Nicotine Before and Soon After Birth: Evidence for Altered Lung Development," does indeed sound like it's about humans, but you'll notice the that first three references used in its introduction were all about "breast-fed rat pups" and "weanling pubertal rats."
Your article then goes on with a lot of information about maternal primary smoking until finally, by the 13th reference, we find some real information about secondhand smoke when both the mother and father smoke all during the pregnancies. Unfortunately the relationship to secondhand smoke "was substantially reduced" and broke down to statistical insignificance after being corrected for maternal smoking itself: an exposure on the order of 100 to 1,000 times as intense as your maids are likely to encounter.
Your study then goes on to note:
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"Numerous studies over the last 20 years have shown that children who are exposed to tobacco smoke during gestation are at increased risk of having airway hyperresponsiveness and asthma [12].
and backs up that statement with a reference tracking another article titled "Tobacco smoke exposure and tracking of lung function into adult life." One might think that this was finally a study showing the danger of secondhand smoke exposure during pregnancies, right? Heh, try again: the lead off sentence of the Abstract is "Maternal smoking during pregnancy leads to abnormal lung function in infancy that tracks through to later childhood and continues into adult life." NOTE: "Maternal smoking," not "secondhand smoke exposure." The only notes about secondhand smoke exposure are: "The effects of passive smoke exposure vary with genetic factors, gender, race and exposure to other pollutants." and an observation that secondhand smoke can "aggravate symptoms and have a negative effect on lung function in those with asthma." when the passive smoke exposure is COMBINED with "subsequent active smoking." Sheeesh!
Pretty soon we'll be hearing that George Burns died prematurely because he "was exposed to low levels of tobacco smoke early in life."
Most of your further selections again seem far more concentrated on the hundred-to-thousandfold greater exposures of active smoking, including the scary note on "teratogenic" effects "perturbing embryogenesis."
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There is more, but I think you get the gist of it.
You seem to have missed my point entirely about how Antismokers use medical terminology in a deliberate attempt to frighten innocent layfolks, particularly reprehensible when it is used to cause emotional distress and familial conflicts during pregnancies. Yes, I got "the gist of it" all too well Suzy.
You go on to say,
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So let us hope those poor baby rats did not give their lives in vain, and that we can convince more moms not to smoke and not to expose their children to second hand smoke.
which would be fine and dandy -- IF it were done honestly.
By the way, the authors of the article recommend that pregnant women not use nicotine replacement products.
And I have to admit that I found this particularly funny:
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And smokers, what do you do if you are on a family trip with your kids. Smoking room or non-smoking?
Suzy, I'm sure those smokers would do exactly what they do for every other day of their kids' lives: either smoke around them (as the great majority of the longest-lived generation in the world grew up with) or not.
Last edited by Michael J. McFadden; 01-09-2012 at 08:38 AM..
Reason: format fixing for clarity and ease of reading
Frank and Yooper, thank you for the appreciation and humor. I try not to fill threads with a lot of cut and paste, but then you run into people who seem to simply be afraid to read material from the other side: after all "There is no safe level" of the truth, is there? :>
A final quick note on your comments Suzy. You wrote,
Quote:
Originally Posted by suzy_q2010
If you want to read all 19 papers, feel free to do so. Since I see no evidence of fraud, I do not need to.
I did not indicate any evidence of fraud in those papers Suzy. What I said was the following:
"Suzy, I do not believe your "19 research papers" all studied enough smokers "actively smoking less than one cigarette per day" to produce that dot on your graph. "
If you'd like to state that they DID all do so, please say so. In that case I'll check. If not, then your point is, as Katiana would say, "a deflection."
A final quick note on your comments Suzy. You wrote,
I did not indicate any evidence of fraud in those papers Suzy. What I said was the following:
"Suzy, I do not believe your "19 research papers" all studied enough smokers "actively smoking less than one cigarette per day" to produce that dot on your graph. "
If you'd like to state that they DID all do so, please say so. In that case I'll check. If not, then your point is, as Katiana would say, "a deflection."
Do not use me to try to prove your points. By rights, we're not supposed to talk about other posters.
I believe suzy said the studies collectively studied 6600 pepole. That is certainly enough to avoid any "sample bias" due to small sample size.
Last edited by Katarina Witt; 01-09-2012 at 09:52 AM..
Reason: clarify
If you were to travel with a child, would you choose a smoking room or a non-smoking room?
Do you smoke around children --- yours or those of other people?
Mr. McFadden says you do, because you practice what you preach.
Do you encourage children to smoke?
Have you ever bought cigarettes for a minor child, yours or not yours?
I will withdraw the question about allowing a pregnant family member to clean a motel room, because you all obviously smoke inside your homes, and any pregnant members of the family are exposed to smoke saturated surfaces anyway.
So, do you want your kids and grand kids to emulate you and smoke?
This was a study of the brains of stillborns and infants who died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). That means it was pieces of baby brain being sliced and diced, not rat brains.
"In our view cigarette smoke is the main factor involved in human EP alterations in unexplained fetal and infant death. In fact, a very high percentage (68%) of SIUD/SIDS victims with EP developmental alterations had a smoker mother. The work by Bajanowski et al. [43] supports this hypothesis. These authors reported a high concentration of cotinine, the major oxidative metabolite of nicotine, in the CSF of SIDS victims with smoker mothers. During pregnancy, about 80 to 90% of the inhaled nicotine is absorbed systemically, as assessed using 14C-nicotine [44]. Most of the constituents of tobacco smoke, in particular nicotine and carbon monoxide, are able to pass through the placental-fetal barrier. By chromatography, Malkawi et al. [45] detected significant concentrations of cotinine primarily in CSF samples from newborn babies of smoker mothers, indicating that it rapidly permeates through the blood-brain barrier.
In conclusion, we feel able to say that noxious agents passed from the mother to fetus cause damage to the EP before other autonomic nervous system centers. Therefore, the EP, being the nervous system structure primarily showing structural and/or functional abnormalities in these conditions, should be examined in-depth first in victims of sudden fetal or infant death with smoker mothers."
So guys, what do you say? Whether there are lethal levels of polonium in second and third hand smoke or not, do you want your children and grand children to be exposed to it? Is it all right, since they will not be poisoned by polonium?
P.S. There is no such thing as a "smoke molecule."
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I try not to fill threads with a lot of cut and paste, but then you run into people who seem to simply be afraid to read material from the other side: after all "There is no safe level" of the truth, is there? :>
