Spinoff: Second Hand Smoke Risks: Fact or Fiction?

[AustinChief]

I know we have had this debate before but I feel like getting a fresh perspective on this.

I would like to hear people's beliefs on the subject BUT I won't accept a simple "well the CDC says this or Penn and Teller say that"... as support. You have to actually presents FACTS.

I personally don't think a legit study has been done to prove a statistically significant health risk to second hand smoke. That doesn't mean that risks don't exist.. that means that there is no hard science backing up the idea.

HAIL SCIENCE!

Ok, I'll start with my facts backing up this up in the next post....

[penchief]

Originally Posted by pr_capone

Hey pen... you just got Bugeatered.

No I didn't. I have a great deal of experience in multi-family housing and I know for a fact what I say is true.

[penchief]

Originally Posted by chiefsfootballfan

whiny person alert

asthma is directly linked to pollen count & mold spore rates. states such as Hawaii, missouri & New York have the highest asthma rates.

http://www.cdc.gov/VitalSigns/Asthma/#StateInfo

So medical science is wrong? Holy shit. I can't believe how many people will actually resort to undermining data in order to justify what they believe or don't want to believe.

[Lex Luthor]

Smokers get offended and feel persecuted when they are told they can't blow their smoke in everybody else's faces.

[AustinChief]

Originally Posted by Brainiac

Smokers get offended and feel persecuted when they are told they can't blow their smoke in everybody else's faces.

This has nothing to do with smokers rights. (If anything it's about property owners rights) This is simply about BAD SCIENCE and why you are willing to swallow it without doing your own critical thinking and without even LOOKING at the studies I have posted so far.

[bishop_74]

C'mon. This is silly. It is what it is. You can second guess results all you want, but the fact remains that exposure increases risk of cancer.

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/id...01126?irpc=932

http://www.epa.gov/smokefree/pubs/strsfs.html

[Bugeater]

Originally Posted by penchief

So have I and I can assure you it is.

I can assure you that you were wasting your money if you called in ServiceMaster.

[AustinChief]

Originally Posted by bishop_74

C'mon. This is silly. It is what it is. You can second guess results all you want, but the fact remains that exposure increases risk of cancer.

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/id...01126?irpc=932

http://www.epa.gov/smokefree/pubs/strsfs.html

And yet again we get opinion with NO FACTS to back it up. Your first link is just a bunch of projections based on cherry picked data sets that show statistically insignificant relative risks. Let me try to explain this again. If you have a relative risk of say 1.16, that means that you are looking at a possible 16% increase in risk. Now, if your CI in that instance is .92-1.46 then your finding is not significant because it could just as easily TRULY be .92 (meaning 8% LOWER risk) Now, if we decide to IGNORE the ACCEPTED practice and make the bogus claim that there simply is a 16% increase in risk.. then we run the numbers against number of people exposed, incidence of lung cancer, etc etc... you end up with the complete spurious "facts" that you seem so ready to accept at face value.

OH, and your second link is to data that has already been debunked thoroughly and thrown out IN COURT. Guys, the early 90's EPA study is worthless.. please quit quoting it unless you can prove otherwise. (hint, you can't.. I can't show page after page of bias and blatant lies that went in to it.)

I'm still waiting for anyone to show facts instead of just regurgitating false conclusions.

[Easy 6]

Man, you're throwing out a bunch of pure gobbledygook, AC.

[AustinChief]

Originally Posted by scott free

Man, you're throwing out a bunch of pure gobbledygook, AC.

Those crazy science wizards with their strange incantations!!! :D

If anyone wants to read up on RR and CI... here ya go
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_risk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_interval

And here is a non wiki article to explain further...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1706071/
Where I will quote...

It is important to calculate a confidence interval for each odds ratio. A confidence interval that includes 1.0 means that the association between the exposure and outcome could have been found by chance alone and that the association is not statistically significant. An odds ratio without a confidence interval is not very meaningful.

SOOOO... for each "study" you find that backs up the assertion that ETS (environmental tobacco smoke) is a significant health risk... please check the CI and if it include 1.0... toss that study and move on. These are not my rules... they are THE rules.

OH, and here is another paper which can shed light on OR, RR and CI...
http://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk/bandoli...conf_inter.pdf
and a quote...(just to be clear "no effect" is a 1.0 value when dealing with RR)

If the confidence interval captures the
value reflecting ‘no effect’, this represents
a difference that is statistically nonsignificant
(for a 95% confidence interval,
this is non-significance at the 5% level

[AustinChief]

Originally Posted by Brainiac

And now for some anecdotal evidence:

My ex-wife has asthma. So does my daughter. We divorced 20 years ago, and a couple of years later she married a smoker.

Her health declined considerably after she started living with a smoker. She has regular checkups with her doctor. After she'd been married about a year, she went back for another checkup. Her lung capacity was greatly reduced and her asthma was much worse. Her doctor said (and this is pretty much verbatim) "What's going on here? You're living with a smoker, aren't you?".

Her second husband was a gigantic douchebag who smoked constantly in the house, despite having a wife and stepdaughter with asthma. My ex-wife's asthma got much worse the entire time she was married to him. My daughter also had a very difficult time with her asthma back in those days.

My ex-wife finally decided she'd had enough of his shit and divorced him. (It wasn't because he was a smoker. It was because he was control-freak and a total prick.) Guess what? Her health and my daughter's health IMMEDIATELY improved when they got away from douchebag and his secondhand smoke. They still carry rescue inhalers, but they rarely use them any more.

So you can say whatever you want about smokers' rights, and you can quote whatever "scientific studies" have been trotted out by the tobacco industry, but the fact is that secondhand smoke IS harmful, and it eventually kills a hell of a lot nonsmokers. That's why so many cities have banned it, and that's why the American Heart Association estimates that approximately 38,000 people die each year from heart and blood vessel disease caused by secondhand smoke. That's also why the World Health Organization estimates that 600,000 people die every year from secondhand smoke.

All of the health organizations say secondhand smoke is extremely harmful. The tobacco industry says it isn't. I find the health organizations (the American Cancer Society, the World Health Organization, the American Heart Association, the Environmental Protection Agency, and NUMEROUS others) to be far more credible than the shills for the tobacco industry.

By the way, there is a happy and appropriate ending to my anecdotal story. The rat bastard who married my ex-wife and forced her and my daughter to inhale his secondhand smoke is now dead. He died of lung cancer.

Again.. it's crap like this that infuriates me. You seem to have absolutely no regard for science and objective methodologies.

#1 you admit that the guy she married was a control freak and an all around dick head. You ever consider that this would cause a remarkable increase in STRESS for both the woman and her child? You do realize there are more studies showing a relationship with STRESS and asthma right? I have no clue what happened in this case, but you see how using faulty logic and assumption can get you in trouble.

#2 Don't even begin with the whole "big tobacco" is making up all these studies nonsense. I can show you an assload of "studies" funded by big pharma.. you know, the guys who make all the stop smoking aids. So that ridiculous argument cuts both ways.

Why don't you stop asserting something as fact before you take the time to read up on the topic and realize that the "proof" you keep espousing, just isn't there.

[Rasputin]

Is my smoking bothering any of you?

[Brock]

Originally Posted by stevieray

...this crap again?



my clothes! my clothes!

You stink and your breath is bad.

[NewChief]

Here's one for you:

The fact that second hand smoke is bad for you is just accepted this day in age, thus there is no reason for a study. If you're so interested, fund a study. The rest of us will just go along pretty much going with common sense: blowing smoke in your kids' face probably isn't a good idea.

[Bugeater]

Originally Posted by NewChief

Here's one for you:

The fact that second hand smoke is bad for you is just accepted this day in age, thus there is no reason for a study. If you're so interested, fund a study. The rest of us will just go along pretty much going with common sense: blowing smoke in your kids' face probably isn't a good idea.

Hyperbole much?

[NewChief]

Originally Posted by Bugeater

Hyperbole much?

Okay. Go light one up and blow it in a kids' face in public. See how that goes over for you. Perception is reality, and smokers lost this battle. Keep fighting the good fight. Maybe in 100 years people will recognize that smokers were like the Jews of this millenia.