Misology in America Part 2.1

Misology in America Part 2.1
By Robert E. Reis

Why do most people believe that smoking is dangerous?
Studies which in any other area of science would be rejected as second-rate and inferior but which support antismoking are accepted as first-rate.
Studies which are conducted according to orthodox and rigorous design but do not support the idea that smoking is harmful are not merely ignored but suppressed.
The public health authorities and health care professionals have ignored their duty to tell the truth.

Misology in America Part 2.1
By Robert E. Reis

Why do most people believe that smoking is dangerous?
Studies which in any other area of science would be rejected as second-rate and inferior but which support antismoking are accepted as first-rate.
Studies which are conducted according to orthodox and rigorous design but do not support the idea that smoking is harmful are not merely ignored but suppressed.
The public health authorities and health care professionals have ignored their duty to tell the truth.
Misology is the hatred of objective knowledge won by the scrupulous use of the scientific method when it contradicts the political goals, ideology or religious faith of the misologists.
Misologists dominate the discussion of public policies in several areas in the modern world.
In the United States misologists predominate in the media, the universities, the schools, and among the elected politicians and the clergy.
For many decades the public health authorities, the media and politicians have propagated dire warnings about the harmfulness of smoking tobacco products for the individual smoker. When these dire warnings failed to persuade all smokers to stop, the public health authorities began propagating deceitful warnings about the effects of passive inhalation of tobacco smoke by non-smokers.
Many people have been gulled by the fact that the governments of 168 nations have signed and currently 164 have ratified the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which states that “Parties recognize that scientific evidence has unequivocally established that exposure to tobacco smoke causes death, disease and disability.”
[WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control” (PDF). World Health Organization. 2005-02-27. http://www.who.int/tobacco/framework/WHO_FCTC_english.pdf ].
Public health professionals and other scam artist have provoked hysteria about smoking and lung cancer. Every smoker has been taught to worry about his or her smoking and lung cancer. Malaria kills more people in the United States each year than lung cancer. Do you sit up all night worrying about malaria? Diarrheal diseases kill more people in the United States each year than lung cancer. Is diarrhea high on your list of health concerns? Tuberculosis kills more people every year in the United States than lung cancer. Are you trembling in your boots, yet?
If the “official truth” that smoking tobacco is a horrifying health hazard is true, then international statistics on the rate of tobacco use in different countries should show a consistent relationship to the number of people who die from cancer and from heart disease in these countries. The international statistic do not show any consistent relationship between the percentage of smokers in a country and the percentages of people dying of cancer and heart disease. The “official truth” is a lie.
Isn’t it astonishing that more people are dying of cancer per 100, 000 in the United States where only 17.5% of people smoke tobacco every day than in Austria where 36.3 % of people smoke tobacco every day.
Let’s look at some more comparisons.
Austria is the country with the highest rate of daily smokers in the world. 36.3% percent of Austrians smoke every day. 280 Austrians per 100,000 die of cancer each year. 109.3 Austrians die of hearth disease each year.
Greece is the country with the second highest rate of daily smokers in the world. 35% of Greeks smoke every day. 68.8 Greeks per 100,000 die of heart disease each year. The number of Greeks who die from cancer each year is so low that Greece does not appear in the international statistics of the for the countries with the highest rates of cancer deaths.
Hungary is the country with the third highest rate of daily smokers in the world. 33.8% of Hungarians smoke every day. 411 Hungarians per 100,000 die of cancer each year. 192.1 Hungarians per 100,000 die of heart disease each year.
Luxembourg is the country with the fourth highest rate of daily smokers in the world. 33% of Luxembourgers smoke every day. 409.7 Luxembourgers per 100,000 die of cancer each year but only 68.9 per 100, 000 die of heart disease.
The United States is far down the list of countries where people smoke tobacco daily. In fact, the United States is ranked as 29th. Only 17.5% of Americans smoke tobacco every day. However, 321.9 Americans per 100, 000 die of cancer each year and 106.5 Americans per 100,000 die of heart disease each year.
Let us look at the list of the sixteen countries where the most people smoke tobacco products every day.
#1 Austria: 36.3% #2 Greece: 35% #3 Hungary: 33.8% #4 Luxembourg: 33%
#5 Turkey: 32.1% #6 Netherlands: 32% #7 S. Korea.: 30.4% #8 Japan: 30.3%
#9 Spain: 28.1% #10 Denmark: 28% #11 Poland: 27.6% #12 Belgium: 27%
#13 Ireland: 27% #14 France: 27% #15 Switzerland: 26.8% #16 Mexico: 26.4%
How many of the top sixteen smoking nations are in the top sixteen nations for worst rates of cancer deaths?
Only six are in the top sixteen:  Austria ,Hungary, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Ireland, and France!
How many of the top sixteen smoking nations are in the top sixteen nations for worst rates of heart disease deaths?
Only five are in the top sixteen: Austria, Hungary, Denmark, Belgium, and France!
How many of the sixteen countries with the worst rates of cancer deaths are among the sixteen countries with the highest daily rates of tobacco smoking?
Only six: Netherlands, Hungary, Luxembourg, Ireland,  France, and Austria!
How many of the sixteen countries with the worst rates of heart disease deaths are among the sixteen countries with the highest daily rates of tobacco smoking?
Only four of the sixteen top smoking nations make this list: Hungary, Ireland, Austria, and Denmark !
A rational person ought to conclude that the correlation between smoking tobacco products daily and horrible health consequences is weak. How weak is it?
The first scientific study in the United Kingdom on the supposed relationship between smoking and lung cancer was done by Richard Doll and Bradford Hill in 1950. They asserted that smokers seemed more likely to develop lung cancer than non-smokers.
Sir Ronald Fisher, arguably the greatest statistician of the 20th century, noticed a bizarre anomaly in their results. Doll and Hill had asked their subjects if they inhaled. Fisher showed that men who inhaled were significantly less likely to develop lung cancer than non-inhalers. As Fisher said, “even equality would be a fair knock-out for the theory that smoke in the lung causes cancer.”
The American Surgeon General issued “Smoking and Health” in 1964. It declared that in the Doll and Hill study “…no difference in the proportion of smokers inhaling was found among male and female cases and controls.” This was a blatant lie.
In 1968 fourteen hundred British civil servants, all smokers, were divided into two similar groups. Half were encouraged and counselled to quit smoking. These formed the test group. The others, the control group, were left to their own devices. For ten years both groups were monitored about their health and smoking status.
The results of the Whitehall study were contrary to all expectation. The quit group showed no improvement in life expectancy. Nor was there any change in the death rates due to heart disease, lung cancer, or any other cause with one exception: certain other cancers were more than twice as common in the quit group. After twenty years there was still no benefit in life expectancy for the quit group.
In 1982, the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial Research Group reported their results in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The American research was based on the study of 12, 886 subjects.
In 1986, the World Health Organization’s European Collaborative Group issued its final report on the ‘European collaborative trial of multifactorial prevention of coronary heart disease: final report on the 6-year results.” It was based on the study of 60, 881 subjects.  In Sweden the ‘multifactor primary prevention trial in Goteborg’  was published in the European Heart Journal. This report was based on 30,022 subjects.
The results of all of these studies were consistent, plainspoken and unambiguous: giving up smoking, even when fortified by improved diet and exercise, produced no increase in life expectancy. There was no change in the death rate for heart disease or for cancer.
in 1989 the Surgeon General of the United States issued his summary: “Reducing the Health Consequences of Smoking: 25 Years of Progress”. He avoided mentioning the scientific reports except to lie about the results of the MRFIT:
“The MRFIT study shows that smoking status and number of cigarettes smoked per day have remained powerful predictors for total mortality and the development of CHD [coronary heart disease], stroke, cancer, and COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease]. In the study population, there were an estimated 2,249 (29 percent) excess deaths due to smoking, of which 35 percent were from CHD and 21 percent from lung cancer. The nonsmoker-former smoker group had 30 percent fewer total cancers than the smoking group over the 6-year follow up.”
The Surgeon General later admitted that none of this was true.
In 1990 the Surgeon General published “The Health Benefits of Smoking Cessation”. The MRFIT results were described this time:: “there was no difference in total mortality between the special intervention [quit] and usual care groups.” But the results were rejected by a deception.
MRFIT and the other studies were rejected because the combined change in other factors - e.g.  diet and exercise - made it impossible to apportion the benefit due to quitting smoking alone. This is absurd because all of the studies had shown that there was no improvement in life expectancy from the combined health changes to apportion.
In the United States and in Australia the respective government agencies responsible for providing objective health information to their peoples rejected proper scientific methodology in favor of using uncontrolled, non-intervention, non-randomized surveys provided by the racketeers at the American Cancer Society. They relied on the infamous Hammond study. 
How infamous is the Hammond study? It was used as an example of how not to do research in a 1962 university textbook in statistics.
Hammond’s work, with its demonstrated faulty methodology, was used by the Australian authorities to deduce that smoking causes premature death to the extent of 17,800 per year in Australia.
Real scientists at the Australian Bureau of Statistics examined the data for Australia and reported that cancer and heart disease are more common among non-smokers than among smokers.
What’s one more lie among the health care professions?
It can in fact be shown that the mean age at death from alleged smoking-related causes is about 1 year greater than from alleged nonsmoking-causes.
[See: ]http://members.iinet.net.au/~ray/finch2.pdf]
During all this time health authorities have repeatedly and persistently lied to the public in the United States and around the world.
In June 1988, in Western Australia the Health Department in full page advertisements in local papers declared: “The statistics are frightening. Smoking will kill almost 700 women in Western Australia this year. If present trends continue, lung cancer will soon overtake breast cancer as the most common malignant cancer in women”.
We all are used to health departments issuing such announcements.
Everywhere we are told that smokers should quit and live longer when every controlled trial has demonstrated this claim to be false.
Is there anything that can be said with certainty about the health and life expectancy of smokers and non-smokers? The evidence indicates little difference.
Smoking could be a major cause of lung cancer or even the only cause yet also be associated with long life.
The Japanese are amongst the heaviest smokers in the world. They also live the longest.
Most agents have both good and bad effects on health and life expectancy. It is the net result which is important.
Peter Finch is a professor of mathematical statistics in Australia. He has contributed to The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Information Sciences, The Australian Journal of Statistics, The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Acta Mathematica Scientia, Biometrics, The European Journal of Cancer and Clinical Oncology, as well as to such books as The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, The Encyclopedia of Statistical Science and The Foundations of Statistical Theories in the Physical Sciences.
He has concluded that “even if one accepts the edited versions of the facts presented by health promoters, then their message should perhaps more accurately be: smoking kills relatively infrequently.”
How infrequently?
Professor Finch points out that for every 100,000 smokers 99, 841 will not get lung cancer as a result of smoking.
That is right. 99.841 percent of smokers will not get lung cancer as a result of smoking.
Ninety-nine thousand eight hundred and forty-one is a very large number.
Everyone agrees the inhaling of tobacco smoke by smokers is not an attractive habit to non-smokers.
What is the scientific basis for the belief that secondhand tobacco smoke, environmental tobacco smoke or passive inhaling of tobacco smoke from cigarettes smoked by other people caused health problems among the nonsmokers?
A study of environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality in a study of Californians from 1960 to 1998 found there was no causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality.
An enormous German study on passive smoke, cancer and cardiovascular disease among flight attendants over a thirty seven year period found a remarkably low standardized incidence ratio for lung cancer among female flight attendants and no increase for male flight attendants.
The American Cancer Society found no association at all between exposure to Environmental Tobacco Smoke and female breast cancer mortality.
The American Lung Association International Conference decided on April 25, 1999 that no scientific studies have showed a convincing link between passive smoking and asthma
The International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France concluded that environmental tobacco smoke exposure during childhood was not associated with an increased risk of lung cancer.
The Australian Federal Court condemned the Australian National Health & Medical Research Council for deliberately suppressing scientific evidence. Justice Finn ordered the A.N.H.M.R.C. to remove their recommendation that smoking by banned in public places from their report. He found that this recommendation could not be inferred from the evidence contained in the report.

A 1995 Canadian study from the Respiratory Epidemiology Unit, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and Department of Sociology, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, shows no association between asthma in children and environmental tobacco smoke.
The American Cancer Society committed a colossal fraud on the American people. They claimed that secondhand tobacco smoke killed about the 53,000 Americans each year. The real number is zero.
Results from personal air monitors carried by more that 1,000 people in cities across Europe revealed that even the most exposed passive smoker inhales the equivalent of 0.02 of a cigarette a day - 10 times lower than Government-backed estimates.
Professor Finch, Foundation Professor of Mathematical Statistics at Monash University, Australia, since 1964, has documented how public opinion has been turned - often viciously - against smokers for fear of being harmed by ‘passive smoking.’ There is no acceptable scientific basis for such a trumped-up danger.
Scientists have proved that it takes more than 48,000 hours of exposure to Environmental Tobacco Smoke to inhale the equivalent of one cigarette.
Scientists have studied the effects of smoking on a nonsmoking wife or husband. They have not found any increase in the risk for heart disease in either males or females.
There is no association between parental smoking and childhood cancer, especially with leukemia, the most-hyped supposed risk.
The Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles disclosed the antismoking industry’s lies about a “link” between secondhand smoking and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. They found no evidence of any such link.
Michael Crichton, Medical Doctor and world famous author spoke out.
“I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it.”
Ironically, Dr. Crichton, who was a non-smoker who hated cigarette smoke in his presence, died of throat cancer in 2008.
You can watch .Dr. Crichton discuss smoking at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGoZ-b1OaW4
A study by UCLA epidemiologist James Enstrom and State University of New York epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat concluded there is no significant association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and heart disease and lung cancer.
None of the studies on secondhand smoke have ever proved the epidemiological existence of a risk. Repeat, none. The damage caused by inhaling secondhand tobacco smoke is too small to measure.
I am not going to suggest that smoking tobacco products will make smokers more successful marathon runners, but I do suggest that relying upon the misologists currently in power for accurate advice on any issue is imprudent.

Doll, R. and Hill, A.B. (1950), “Smoking and carcinoma of the lung”, British Medical Journal, ii pp739-48
Doll, R. and Hill, A.B. (1964), “Mortality in relation to smoking: ten years’ observations of British doctors”, British Medical Journal, i pp1460-7
Surgeon General (1964), “Smoking and Health” http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/sgr/sgr_1964/sgr64.htm
Rose, G. and P.J.S. Hamilton (1978), ‘A randomised controlled trial of the effect on middle-aged men of advice to stop smoking’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 32, pages 275-281.
Rose, G., P.J.S. Hamilton, L. Colwell and M.J. Shipley (1982), ‘A randomised controlled trial of anti-smoking advice: 10-year results’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 36, pages 102-108
Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial Research Group (1982), ‘Multiple risk factor intervention trial: risk factor changes and mortality results’, Journal of the American Medical Association, 248, pages 1465-1477.
WHO European Collaborative Group (1986), ‘European collaborative trial of multifactorial prevention of coronary heart disease: final report on the 6-year results’, Lancet, 1, pages 869-872.
Wilhelmsen, L., G. Berglund, E. Elmfeldt, G. Tibblin, H. Wedel, K. Pennert, A. Vedin, C. Wilhelmsson and L. Werks (1986), ‘The multifactor primary prevention trial in Goteborg’, European Heart Journal, 7, pages 279-288.
Surgeon General (1982) The Health Consequences of Smoking - Cancer: A Report of the Surgeon General.
Surgeon General (1989) Reducing the Health Consequences of Smoking: 25 Years of Progress: A Report of the Surgeon General: Executive Summary and Full Report
Surgeon General (1990) The Health Benefits of Smoking Cessation: A Report of the Surgeon General
Commonwealth Department of Community Services and Health, Canberra (1988) “The Quantification of Drug Caused Morbidity and Mortality in Australia”.
Wallis, W.A. and Roberts, H.V. (1962) “Statistics: A New Approach”, Methuen and Co. Ltd.
Australian Bureau of Statistics: Smokers are less likely to have cancer, heart disease. Australian Bureau of Statistics, No 4382.0, “1989-90 National Health Survey: Smoking”
[BMJ 2003;326:1057 (17 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.326.7398.1057
Environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality in a prospective study of Californians, 1960-98
James E Enstrom, researcher1, Geoffrey C Kabat, associate professor2
1 School of Public Health, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1772, USA, 2 Department of Preventive Medicine, State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY 11794-8036, USA. http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/326/7398/1057 ]

Posted by Robert Reis on Sunday, April 4, 2010 at 02:22 PM in Health
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