Sunday, May 1, 2016

Smoking and Cancer - A Question

I am going to insert a video by John Oliver where he discusses smoking, it is funny and points out an interesting statistic. In 1965 43% of people smoked, that number is now 18%. That means that the number of people smoking is half of what it used to be. So, why are lung cancer rates. Now according to the American Lung Association, lung cancer is going up and has been for awhile. I will provide a link to this.


American Lung Association - Lung Cancer Fact Sheet.

Now I want to be clear, because this is not a post about smoking, smoking causes cancer in smokers. What is nonsense is second hand smoke causing cancer. If you ask an industrial hygienist (the people who scientifically measure smoke from just about everything you can imagine and all other workplace exposures to everything you will find that they say there is NO cancer caused by second hand smoke because the amounts received are way below any harmful levels. I know, when I was told to investigate the matter years ago, that is what they told me and then they gave me the studies to read. I read them and was disgusted by the lies we were being told..

The study that created the concept of second hand smoke was a study of children born to mothers who smoked while they were pregnant. Babies who had received first hand smoke, not second hand. It is like comparing a baby whose mother drank alcohol while pregnant to one who drank alcohol after she stopped nursing. They are not the same thing.

I want you to think about this, we are writing more and more laws against cigarette smoking while states are increasingly legalizing smoking marijuana. We are even outlining e-cigarettes which don't burn anything and merely vaporize a liquid. Lets face it, we love to outlaw things that other people do and we find offensive. This country actually outlawed alcohol for a decade, that failed miserably and we had to change the Constitution to make it legal again. But that is not the point either.

The point of this post is to say that you have to be very careful of people who claim the science is settled and shut up opposition. Industrial hygienists did not come out in force to say that there was no such thing as second hand smoke because the industry relied on medical doctors who immediately were ostracized for disagreeing with the official word.

UPDATE:

Fox - Stossel: Lung cancer and me.

Reporter John Stossel has lung cancer. People berated him for being a smoker and that he deserved what he got. There is only one problem with that analysis, he never smoked.