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Auckland, Nov 26 NZPA - One percent of deaths globally are caused by passive smoking, according to a new study.
The University of Auckland's Professor Alistair Woodward, co-author of the study in medical journal The Lancet, said the world's 1.2 billion smokers were harming billions of non-smokers, and it was children who suffered most.
The authors, who gathered information from 192 countries, estimated 40 percent of the world's children, 33 percent of male non-smokers, and 35 percent of female non-smokers were regularly exposed to second-hand smoke in 2004.
In total, 603,000 deaths were attributable to second-hand smoke. Forty-seven percent of those deaths occurred in women, 28 percent in children, and 26 percent in men.
"Passive smoking is a global health issue," Prof Woodward said.
"We have made great progress in New Zealand and many other high income countries. But billions of people are still exposed, needlessly, to second-hand smoke.
"This paper puts a figure on the cost, globally, in premature deaths and loss of good health. We hope our findings will spur policy-makers to take action."
The authors recommended the immediate enforcement of the World Health Organisation's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, and the implementation of further educational strategies. They also wanted to dispel the myth that developing countries could wait to deal with tobacco-related diseased until they had dealt with infectious diseases.
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Comments
Thu, 25/11/2010 - 21:56 —
Thu, 25/11/2010 - 21:56 — Michael J. McFadden (not verified)
I think people should treat
I think people should treat Professor Woodward's work with the degree of seriousness it deserves. For example, compare it to the following posting of a concern in the "Paranormal" section of AskExperts.com:
===
Question
I just read about another person having the same problem with smelling cigarette smoke, but no one smokes at home. I have asked my friend if she can smell the cigarette smoke, and she cannot.
I work from home, and when I smell the cigarette smoke, it makes it hard for me to breathe. I would do the same, place my face under my shirt to avoid smelling it. I do have environmental asthma, and my health has been pretty good. But its very frustrating, and I do not wish to having to take my inhaler for something that no one can smell. I have asked ...if there is a spirit to please leave my home. I even then commanded it to leave in the name of Jesus, and prayed a short version of the rosary. I have had experiences in the past through visions and even heard something or someone call out my name. I even asked God to take this gift away, because I did not want it nor was I ready for it. I am not sure if I triggered this to happen, because I have been watching shows on TV that deals with paranormal activities and spirits. I do believe they do exits. What can I do?
===
After a body count is established for Dr. Winickoff's third hand smoke and the newly presented concern about fourth hand smoke (I.E. the dangerous poisons your children might be exposed to if they are touched by someone who might have been near a smoker. And no, I am not making that up either.) the Dr. Woodward can work on what may be the final frontier: ODS, Other Dimensional Smoke!
(Thanks to JanetDA on Mike Siegel's blog for the concept!)
Michael J. McFadden,
Author of "Dissecting Antismokers' Brains" (And after the above you can see WHY they needed dissecting!)
And on a more deliberately
And on a more deliberately serious note I'd like to add something. The 600,000 "deaths" cited in this article are imaginary: they are spit out by a computer model based on or derived from a program called SAMMEC: Smoking Attributable Mortality, Morbidity, and Economic Costs. The number can be anything the researchers want it to be, just depending upon the formulae, estimates, and base numbers they put into it.
If they're against smoking to begin with, or if their projects have gotten paid for with antismoking grants that could have been used to prevent hundreds of thousands of very real, indisputable, and immediate deaths of children from diarrhea, cholera, and plain starvation, then the numbers will show hundreds of thousands of theoretical "secondhand smoke deaths."
The real crime is that the World Health Organization, pushed by antismoking fanatics, is throwing those children into graves simply so it can push its ideological upper middle class nonsense.
- MJM
I think people should treat
I think people should treat McFadden's massive online PR campaign/book promotion blitzkreig with the ridicule it deserves. Google his book for over 14,000 links, many if not most from his own postings on innocent message boards.
His drivel here is typically partisan--and lame. You can compare anything you wish to an infinite choice of message board screwballs, but that's too easy--and pointless; it means nothing. There are any number of ravers on message boards. McF's pal Harleyrider, for example, is a particularly rich trove for the other side to mine--more subnormal than paranormal--but it would be pointless to compare McF's clever PR to Harleyrider's ravings.
No, it's much more relevant to compare McF with Charles K. Johnson, erstwhile head of the Flat Earth Society, a similar fanatic who flew in the face of science. The internet was before Johnson's time, but if he were alive today (and without ethics), he would be here, infesting message boards right alongside McFadden, attaching his "opposing view" to every article that mentioned traveling "around" the world, working hard to promote his agenda and his books.
He'd be posting, for example:
"Wherever you find people with a great reservoir of common sense, they don't believe idiotic things such as the earth spinning around the sun. Reasonable, intelligent people have always recognized that the earth is flat!"
Thanks for the "idea" to some partisan dullard.
Apologies to Voxy for the
Apologies to Voxy for the stalker/fan that follows me around the net. Gene (or GeneB, Genebb, Genebbbb, or any of the other variations he uses to skip by net-blockers) regularly follows Free-Choice supporters around and tries to discredit them by various means ... but almost never seeking actually address the points raised in the news article that are discussed by the previous posters. With me he focuses on the fact that I openly identify myself and my potential "competing interest." Of course if I did *not* do so then he'd attack me for hiding it.
Gene and his friends are driven by intense beliefs. You can that by such things as their claims that the Holocaust was caused by Hitler's smoking. And no, I'm not making that up. Gene showcased it on his own grant-funded website at
http://www.tobacco.org/news/260787.html
where you'll find stuff like this: "Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was a smoker from 1897 - 1924, and had typical smoker symptoms." (Heh... you can also find what they call a "typical murder by smoker" case linked there where a husband bludgeoned his wife to death with 27 hammer blows.)
Meanwhile, I've had a couple of information requests about my mention of Winickoff's "third-hand smoke" opinion survey that's gotten passed off as science in the same way that this current "one percent" claim is passed off. To get the sort of dangerous dose highlighted in that particular set of "news" releases you'd have to have an infant licking floors for literally 3 trillion years: several hundred times the age of the known universe. See:
http://globalhealthlaw.wordpress.com/2009/01/11/third-hand-smoke/#comment-52
for the full figures on that. While the chicanery in the current research isn't as obvious, it would probably be just as clear to anyone with full access to the models and the right statistical training.
In any event, apologies again to Voxy for attracting Gene.
- MJM
McFadden is hilarious. He
McFadden is hilarious.
He thinks I follow him and his tiny cabal around? Ha. I wish. McF's book alone has over 14,000 Google links(!) Follow?? He's impossible to avoid. He owes Voxy an apology all right. Not for me but for his massive spam campaign and his viral marketing.
Apologies are also due for his duplicitous charges. It's so dependable--give him even just a short rope and he tangles himself in his own web of deceit.
Take the Nazi anecdote here (Godwin prize winner):
A comprehensive website like tobacco.org posts all sorts of stories, 50-100+ a day, including press releases from WHO, ACS, Philip Morris and cigar retailers; it even posts a few pro-smoking site emissions. Many sources get their say, but the vast majority of items are plain ordinary stories from the mainstream media. No endorsement necessary.
McF misrepresents tobacco.org because it doesn't fit his ultra-partisan agenda; ordinary knowledge is a threat to him and he desperately needs to discount it. He hates that you might get information from science and normal news sources; he'd much rather you be forced to go to him, to his sites, to his book for his own very special brand of information (control freak). Thus, he spams. And thus he touts the flagrantly dishonest charge that all of tobacco control endorses the Hitler piece and that tobacco.org bruits such wackiness about regularly. Good luck finding anyone from tobacco control in sympathy with the author. And even the briefest glance at tobacco.org disproves McF's characterization. You'd have to search for hours to find his examples, out of, what, over 100,000 items? I don't know, but that's the name of his game--cherry pick some obscure aberration, pull some molehill out of a mountain and voila! it proves the entire mountain is a giant molehill! Classic.
Yes, this is just how McF operates, more in calumny than inquiry. Anyone want to trust his brand of rigorous, objective science? Trust him to tell you the truth, after seeing this?
McF and his friends are driven by intense beliefs. In order to fight science, they must specialize in spam, misrepresentation, smears and dishonest cherry picking.
I don't think they see what they look like to the outside world; but, as the scorpion says in the story, it's their nature--they're scorpions.
Heh... Gene of course has
Heh... Gene of course has never read the material he criticizes or he'd have seen the references direct to the original studies and sources -- something you rarely see in paid antismoking press releases.
In terms of his "not following" folks around with his attacks, simply google:
geneb "Michael J. McFadden"
just like that and check some of the 200 results that pop up. Of course that misses the ones from his other names, but it gives a rough idea. In reference to his charges about cherry picking obscure aberrations, he's been challenged a number of times to produce and defend his own three favorite studies showing any significant health threat from the levels of smoke people would normally encounter in decently ventilated bars or restaurants today. Of course he can't ... so he just charges that the studies we HAVE picked to analyze are "aberrant."
Meanwhile, if you visit his site again, you can try searching for "thirdhand smoke" and I'm sure you'll find a good number of articles about the innocent infants being poisoned by crawling on floors -- without any mention that they'd have to both crawl AND lick those floors for 3 trillion years. That study was even wilder than the current one being examined here, but it spread around the world like wildfire as actually being a serious piece of research. Of all the news organs that covered the story I found only two where the reporters had bothered to read beyond the press release and discover that the only real "research" done had been a random telephone opinion survey.
- MJM
What a piece of work. McF is
What a piece of work.
McF is like a guy in court pleading: "But judge, that cop follows speeders around! He's a stalker! And I have proof! I've been caught all of 200 times out of 14,000 offenses! Ooh, the humanity!"
That's assuming the 200 links mean what McF claims, that I follow him around (you always have to check McF's often-spurious assertions). Even a cursory glance at a few items from the first page of Google results reveals 2 cases of mistaken identity and/or references by 3rd-parties (there's a weird obsession with me going on, I see). In one case, McF and I just happened to post on the same message board, no interaction at all; in 2 others, it's just McFadden trashing me; in another, there's no mention of a geneb period. The fact is, these references are not quite as McF would have you believe. Just like his "science."
Well, easier to attack than defend, easier to confound the issues with a barrage of flak than address the truth. McF can't defend his spam, his branding, or his deliberate misrepresentations of tobacco.org. On the contrary, he side-steps the whole ugly mess and pours out even more swill, this time on original science articles; (sigh) the omniscient McF is well aware tobacco.org usually links directly to the original source material.
And I love the demand to show-and-tell my "three favorite studies showing any significant health threat from the levels of smoke people would normally encounter in decently ventilated bars or restaurants today."
a. My 3 favorite studies! Yes, we're all in 2nd grade now.
b. Note all the qualifiers he slips in: "significant," "normally," "decently ventilated," and--since we're in 2nd grade now--my favorite: "today(!)" There are no instant studies in science, of course. Fools the locals, I suppose.
c. At any rate, McF doesn't get rewarded for spamming websites around the world by being allowed to direct the discussion (control freak).
Because in essence, McF's remarks are a troll. All the lies, misrepresentations, smears, challenges and demands are a classic troll. Rile the crowds, get the action going, because the more "discussion," then the more google listings, and the more chances to promote his book, his links, and his eternal quest to become Big Man on the Internet.
Actually, he does defend his book-selling. And it's my very favorite lame excuse in the whole wide world. He claims he _has_ to flog his book, searing his brand into the flesh of unsuspecting websites around the world--or I'd accuse him of hiding it(!) Any evidence? Of course not, just another lie, more fake omniscience, just BS mind-reading.
BUT--and attend this one carefully, communications majors and website managers-- the charge has a much more sinister function: it excuses his marketing campaign to webmasters, who usually forbid ads on their sites. Branding their sites against their will is necessary, he wails-- to guard against me(!)
It's not really about me, it's a cold calculation--the fact is that 14,000 links can only help an raise an unknown site's rankings and translate into book sales. It's called branding, and it's plain ordinary "viral marketing." PR 101. So whenever he's exposed on a site, he has to come up with an excuse for his PR. This time, it's me.
There's a prime branding example right here: Check out the link he posted; it's to his own diatribe, of course, in which he's posted a quick link straight back to his own site--and presto! His site's now just a hop and a skip from Voxynews. He couldn't make it any easier to get there and buy his book without a flashing billboard on this page's header.
And yet--and this is the beauty part--for all his subterfuge, for all his 14,000+ links and growing, for all his 25 years of striving to become Big Man on the Internet, he still labors in utter obscurity. No one pays him the slightest attention except as a globe-spamming pest.
Michael J. McFadden, meet Charles K. Johnson--my very, very, very favoritest scientist in the whole Flat Earth!
LOL! My "25 years" doing
LOL! My "25 years" doing this stuff Gene? Since Brains was only published six years ago that'd be one heckuva an advance PR campaign!
As usual, virtually no mention at all of Voxy's actual topic: the study on the theoretical deaths due to "passive smoking." The challenge to produce three solid studies always meets a fate similar to what you've seen here: lot of attacks, never an attempt at a serious discussion.
A friend and co-researcher of mine, Dave Kuneman (Dave, as "TobaccoScam" likes to emphasize, used to work as a soda flavoring chemist for Seven-Up -- although they leave out the soda part of it and simply call him a "tobacco industry researcher" since Seven-Up was bought for a few years by PM back in the early 1980s.), recently reminded me of something that should put this "one-percent of all deaths" claim into some perspective. Antismokers today claim about 50,000 deaths per year just in the US from secondary smoke exposure. However such exposure in the last 20 years or so has been only about 10 or 20% what it commonly was back in the 1960s and 70s.
So for the current claim to be true, you'd then expect to see anywhere from 250,000 to 500,000 deaths per year from such exposure back then. Don't you think that maybe, just possibly, that SOMEONE might have noticed it back then? I don't have the figures in front of me, but Dave did an interesting analysis on them at one point which indicated that if such a claim were true then just about *every* nonsmoker's death in that period would have been caused by secondary smoke! Heh... the world would be filled with immortals if no one smoked!!
Meanwhile, as all this exposure has plummeted, we're now seeing, for about the first time in history, the US life expectancy DEcreasing while the rest of the world, including I believe chain-smoking China, continues to increase their life expectancies. Of course there are lots of other significant factors at play, but it's still worth noting.
The one percent propaganda ploy is simply that, a propaganda ploy. And it's a very dangerous and destructive propaganda ploy as it drains attention and funding from other areas where they might really have made a TRUE difference in saving millions (including, to use the Antis favorite schtick: millions of CHILDREN!) from horrible and very real deaths due to such things as cholera and dysentery.
-MJM (No need to identify myself further here... I think Gene's done an admirable job of that already. Gene, your million dollar check is in the mail. LOL!)
McF's Gift of Guff >>geneb:
McF's Gift of Guff
>>geneb: And yet--and this is the beauty part--for all his subterfuge, for all his 14,000+ links and growing, for all his 25 years of striving to become Big Man on the Internet, he still labors in utter obscurity.
>>McF: LOL! My "25 years" doing this stuff Gene? Since Brains was only published six years ago that'd be one heckuva an advance PR campaign!
Did I say McF promoted his brains for 25 years? Of course not. Obviously, "his 25 years of striving to become Big Man on the Internet" would include his book promotion, but that's just a recent addition. Had I meant just promoting his book, I'd have said so. McF doesn't dare to provide a full quote, but affects accuracy by putting his quote marks around "25 years(!)" and dropping the rest of the sentence, which wouldn't fit his agenda. Then he LOL's hysterically over his straw man. Oy. If this calculated, arrant duplicity is so natural, so habitual for McF that he's unaware of how obvious it is, then look for the same lax logic, cherry-picking, agenda-driven spin and gleeful crowing in his "science."
Christmas is early this year. What a wonderful gift McF has given us: a perfect encapsulation, not 2 graphs apart, of his partisan, lying technique. His pointless snark allows readers to directly compare the truth with distortion. You give him enough ribbon, and he ties himself up in a nice little Christmas bow. It's a gift. Thanks!
>>McF: No need to identify myself further here... I think Gene's done an admirable job of that already.
Oh, no, McF, the honor's all yours! You do that wonderfully all on your own. You've well proven exactly who and what you are.
As always Gene, I'm quite
As always Gene, I'm quite content to let folks read the thread and draw their own conclusions.
Which is actually what they should be doing with regard to the whole "secondhand smoke" scam: reading materials behind the press-releases and flashy headlines so that they can actually see the weakness behnd some of the crazy claims.
Did anyone catch Surgeon General Benjamin's interview on PBS the other day? Did you notice her claim that passing by a smoker on the street or in a park was pretty much equivalent to smoking two packs a day? Or the "fact" she noted that California's heart disease rate is 400% lower than any other state because of their bans? Heh... I wonder just how she balances that with California's heart disease rank of 27 out of the 50 states?
- MJM
"As always," no defense
"As always," no defense
>>As always Gene, I'm quite content to let folks read the thread and draw their own conclusions.
"As always," indeed. And as always, McF offers no defense at all. Just a non-answer, instantly followed by an attempt to distract from the whole affair. Every time he paints himself into a corner, he posts this response, a feeble variant of "whistling past the graveyard" or "lying past the evidence." He tries to pull it off with a so-serious face, just like when Pee Wee Herman crashes his bike and tells the sniggling onlookers: "I _meant_ to do that!"
For McF has no excuse for his message-board hijacking and general duplicity--nothing but a hope that no one will have the stomach to go digging through his heaps of swill just so they can climb out of the dumpster encrusted in filth and say, "Oh yeah. This is garbage alright."
And "as always," right after his non-answer, he tries to switch to another subject, to take people's attention off the whole ugly affair. His nonsense-answer would look all too obvious by itself. So he tries to distract, using the magician's slight of hand--"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Look over here--over here I tell you!--Did anyone catch the Surgeon General . . . ?" There was no real reason in the article or previous messages to post his cutesy little pontification--it's meant only to divert your attention from the lameness of his excuse.
Thus, my 2-sentence quote, above. It's short, succinct, to the point, no distractions, no difficulty distilling the McFadden from the McFlak.
Heehee... One of Gene's
Heehee... One of Gene's favorite tactics: showing up on message boards a month after bis opponent has left so that he can "drown out" the recommendation that people read some of the earlier material and verify the sources and facts for themselves.
Somehow he never seems to realize, no matter how often it's pointed out to him, that he simply draws more attention in the long run to what he's trying to drown out through noise.
In some ways I should be grateful, but I always feel sorry for the message boards that are subjected to him. Since I've been called back however, I'll repeat my request from above since nobody seemed able to provide an answer:
"Please offer your three favorite studies showing any significant health threat from the levels of smoke people would normally encounter in decently ventilated bars or restaurants today."
Provide them, and I'll show you what's wrong with them.
- MJM
>>One of Gene's favorite
>>One of Gene's favorite tactics: showing up on message boards a month after bis opponent has left so that he can "drown out" the recommendation that people read some of the earlier material
Huh? This doesn't even make sense, it's yet another McFaddism. He thinks I didn't notice this page's "Notify me of follow-up comments" notice?? Maybe he assumes the rest of us are in the business of spending all our waking hours on message boards promoting ourselves. To the contrary, some of us have, you know, jobs and families and _things to do_.
Whatever, this is more like one of _his_ favorite tactics: showing up on message boards so that he can get in the last word and "drown out" the truth about his PR campaign. In this, I hardly need to "drown out" a thing--please, re-read all you can stomach.
You can pretty much see the garbage for what it is, but it's also helpful to bear in mind that McFadden and his ilk are like the basketball-passers in the famous experiment, and regular normal science is the gorilla appearing in their midst and waving to you. The function of the basketball-passers is to make you miss the main point; science does all it can to help you see reality--but many people will miss it altogether because of the distracting passers and their incessantly flying (message board) basketballs.
Maybe you don't know this and similar experiments. But they are well known amongst magicians, ad-men and PR experts. THEY well know it, THEY know the immense value of distraction; regular people don't of course, they're just trying to make a buck, live decently and raise their kids. But for the pros: well, it's their _business_ to know such research; it's their _business_ to learn these lessons well.
And to deploy them--at you. In this case, by spamming internet message boards, to keeping those basketballs hopping. Otherwise, someone might believe science.
Well, it's just a p-ing match now, isn't it, so I'll do what McF most fears, his greatest terror after 25 years of futilely promoting himself on the internet: stop paying attention to him.
Heh... amazing how Gene can
Heh... amazing how Gene can write hundreds of words while never once touching on the article in question... or answering any of the on-topic questions put to him.
Speaking of the article again however, I wonder how many of those supposed 600,000 deaths were counted from people passing by smokers in parks or on beaches? Mayor Bloomberg in New York seems to feel they pose a deadly threat. What's the current situation in New Zealand as far as such things as parks and beaches and sidewalks and apartment houses go? Have smokers simply been exiled to the rooftops across the land or are you falling behind American activism?
- MJM
Interesting addition: While
Interesting addition:
While wandering the web just now I found another MSNBC news story, this one from 2004, headlined:
"WHO warns against 'kitchen killer'"
but the content of the news story seemed to have been erased from its source at:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6253970/
Fortunately, as is often the case in such things, the Winston Smiths forgot about the web archival services. A bit of work later we have:
http://www.icyte.com/saved/web.archive.org/449776?key=272355ff672093cfc5237f5d043efb5a5f4bbf44
Evidently in 2004 the WHO warned that 1.6 million people, "mainly small children" were dying each year from "inhaling smoke from cooking stoves and indoor fires,"
I guess the news didn't blend too well with the new headlines against ETS. Picture the correct headlines:
"WHO warns that secondhand smoke is about 1/3 as deadly as cooking dinner for your kids!"
Guess that wouldn't have worked quite as well in promoting smoking bans, eh?
- MJM