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Not true Vic. SHS is a very NOTICEABLE example, but it certainly isn't the only one. If you read the third element down in the Rapid Responses of the British Medical Journal at:
(The one titled, "Secondary Smoke, Alcohol, and Death" -- you need to click "read responses") you'll find another example, carcinogenic and highly volatile ethyl alcohol, which you're "forcing" everyone around you, even "the children," to inhale in comparatively very large quantities if you happen to have a drink while in a family pub.
Sounds like a sick joke right off the bat, eh? But read the full argument at that link and see if there are any holes in it.
Read the design and methodology.
The study is an epidemiological study (uses numerous other studies) that then applies a statistical evaluation of probabilities of occurrence and causation to establish a conclusion.
It is what we call hokum.
They do not verify or validate the research they use, they simply take the research and then crunch numbers through a model that attempts to find correlations that they then attempt to make conclusions on.
This is the problem with a lot of the published work on this issue.
I am not saying it isn't possible for such to be the case, but the means to which they attempt to establish such is really just rolling the dice and calling a double roll evidence of something.
Excellent points Nomander, and well-stated! However it would take a lot more than "weeks of exposure" for a nonsmokers to reach the 250 mcgms of benzene exposure. From "Dissecting Antismokers' Brains" (not a copyright violation -- I own the copyright):
The average cigarette produces roughly 300 micrograms of benzene (1986 Report of the Surgeon General. p.130). If the estimates of smoke exposure for the average nonsmoker in Appendix B hold true, then such exposure would equal roughly three tenths of a microgram per hour of sharing a space with a reasonable number of smokers in a decently ventilated public indoor setting.
Benzene is normally found in fruits, fish, vegetables, nuts, dairy products, beverages, and eggs. The National Cancer Institute estimates that an individual may safely ingest up to 250 micrograms in their food per day, every single day of the year. Thus, the “safe” exposure to benzene from one day of a normal diet is roughly equal to the exposure experienced by a nonsmoker sharing an airspace with smokers for over 750 hours. Another way of looking at it would be to compare it to the normal work exposure of a waiter in a decently ventilated Free-Choice restaurant: the waiter would have to work there for four months to receive the equivalent benzene dosage ingested in one day of a “safe” diet.
In 1994, the Air Resources Board of California estimated that California vehicles emitted close to 50 million pounds (i.e. about 23 billion grams) of benzene per year into the atmosphere of California. At 300 micrograms per cigarette, it would take 70 trillion cigarettes to produce what California's vehicles produce in a single year. Try to imagine all the smokers of the entire world, with each and every one of them smoking well over two hundred cigarettes a day, and all crowded into California, and you’ll have a rough comparison to California’s normal vehicle emissions.
For the other elements Antismokers like to play a cherry-picking game, isolating one or two items with nasty implications (e.g. "formaldehyde, used to preserve corpses) and ignore the fact that cooking a good healthy vegetarian meal for one's family on a gas stove exposes them to the formaldehyde output of over a hundred cigarettes.
Thanks for the input, you certainly nail the point even further.
I think that is the issue so many people forget. While we are getting upset about the trace elements in such a topic as ETS, we forget all of the elements we purposely expose ourselves to daily and think nothing of it.
I think it is interesting as if someone was truly concerned, they would need a certain restrictive white coat applied to them if they truly attempted to take on the task of combating the exposure to elements that we encounter in reality.
Vic, you're correct, but the same thing can be said for ANY level of exposure to ANY workplace regulated element: after all, no workplace is ever going to just produce a single "possible threat" in all its activities. Heck, ordinary exhaled human breath contains several thousand VOCs (volatile organic chemicals) that might be killing you right now if you're in a building with another person!
Reasonable guidelines are reasonable guidelines though, and that's why they have things like PELs and TLVs (permissible emission levels and threshold limit values) and if you look at exposures to tobacco smoke even in quite smokey conditions the levels never even come close to reasonable levels of concern. See the table at the end of:
and note how many smokers would have to crowd into a corner bar to even BEGIN to approach levels considered to be unsafe for 8 hour per day exposures every workday. Also note the care I took in building a model that was proof against charges of cherry-picking.
He he he. I was just about to alert you to the presence of this thread. He he he.
so do all you smokers think it is harmless. on a scale from one to ten?
I am not a smoker.
Do I think it is harmless though?
I think that the levels you can realistically come in contact with for the average person (not those with special genetic sensitivities) are safely filtered through the bodies process of toxin filtration like many other toxins we come in contact with daily and never think twice concerning their PEL and TLV levels.
I think anyone who is going to present the argument of it being a danger and then does not also consider and add to their argument the reality of numerous other elements and their levels we come in contact with daily is cheery picking to purport an agenda. That is, they want their position to be valid for this specific situation, but not for others and it is the pinnacle of self interested bias.
so do all you smokers think it is harmless. on a scale from one to ten?
That question very much depends upon at what level of concentration.
Yes, there are dangerous chemicals in tobacco smoke, just as their are dangerous, air-borne chemicals around us all the time from various sources, but they are not a THREAT to us unless their concentration reaches a critical level.
So...in answer to your question: No, it is not harmless BUT it isn't dangerous to us either in concentrations we're normally exposed to in our daily lives. A passing whiff of SHS is not going to hurt you.
The study is an epidemiological study (uses numerous other studies) that then applies a statistical evaluation of probabilities of occurrence and causation to establish a conclusion.
It is what we call hokum.
They do not verify or validate the research they use, they simply take the research and then crunch numbers through a model that attempts to find correlations that they then attempt to make conclusions on.
This is the problem with a lot of the published work on this issue.
I am not saying it isn't possible for such to be the case, but the means to which they attempt to establish such is really just rolling the dice and calling a double roll evidence of something.
Nomander... whoops! I guess I wasn't clear in what I was saying. LOL! I wasn't recommending the STUDY ... I was recommending my response BENEATH the study (you need to click where it says "12 comments" just below the main abstract/info on that link. For convenience:
===
read the third element down in the Rapid Responses of the British Medical Journal at:
so do all you smokers think it is harmless. on a scale from one to ten?
Is it harmless?? No, but few things in life are harmless... even sleeping all day is harmful. On your scale of 1 -10 I'd say it was around a 6 maybe a 7. It's more harmful than drinking milk (unless you're alergic to milk) but less harmful, to me at least, than any perfumes or Fabreeze.
so do all you smokers think it is harmless. on a scale from one to ten?
Still and No have addressed this well, but let me add an example I like to give. If I stuck you in a closet with a few dozen feet of burning deck rope for an hour, you'd be unlikely to survive. It most certainly wouldn't be "harmless."
But if you went to your local fast food emporium and they were hosting a kid's birthday party and brought out a cake with a half dozen or so tiny burning ropes on it that the kid then blew out ... would that be harming you? Would you feel a need to get up and leave the restaurant out of the concern for the possibility that some tiny increment of carcinogen from those fires might land you in a cancer ward someday?
Of course not -- unless you were crazy.
OR... unless you'd been terrorized by a multi-billion-dollar campaign that had beaten the idea into your head for decades that such exposures were "deadly."
And that's exactly the case with tobacco smoke: In normal, decently ventilated situations, it's simply neurotic, perhaps even psychotic, to obsess about the scent or even the visible wisps of smoke in the air; but because of the amount of brainwashing that has occurred over the last thirty years, life-restricting worries that would once have landed a person on a psychiatrist's couch are now being treated as normal.
They're not. A friend of mine took some writing I had done and extended it a bit in a way that I originally thought was just funny. After a while I began realizing it was dead serious: there really *IS* a condition best described by her label of "AntiSmoking Dysfunction Syndrome" and it *IS* a serious affliction that's become very harmful in our society. See:
and then look around you at the people who wave their hands and hold their breath and cross the street and devote huge amounts of time and energy into fighting a "threat" that for the most part is simply an engineered creation designed to promote behavior control.
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