Last summer, in a press release that accompanied his report on secondhand smoke, Surgeon General Richard Carmona claimed "even brief exposure to secondhand smoke" adversely affects the cardiovascular system and increases the risk of heart disease. How brief? Supporters of smoking bans have been competing to answer that question, with each claim less plausible than the last.
Michael Siegel, a physician and a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, has been tracking the claims on his blog (tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com). In November 2005, Siegel faulted the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids for asserting that "as little as 30 minutes of exposure to secondhand smoke can trigger harmful cardiovascular changes, such as increased blood clotting, that increase the risk of a heart attack." The following April, Siegel counted 65 anti-smoking groups that were attributing various adverse cardiovascular consequences, included hardening of the arteries and heart attacks, to a half-hour of second-hand smoke.
One of those groups, SmokeFree Ohio, was also claiming that merely 20 minutes of exposure causes a nonsmoker's platelets to become "as sticky as a smoker's," increasing the chance of a heart attack. Not to be outdone, SmokeFree Wisconsin began warning that after five minutes of exposure, "your body starts closing off arteries." In October the Minnesota Association for Nonsmokers declared that "just thirty seconds of exposure to secondhand smoke can make coronary artery function of non-smokers indistinguishable from [that of] smokers."
As Siegel notes, neither Carmona's report nor the "fact sheets" produced by anti-smoking groups offer evidence to support such claims. Since cardiovascular disease takes many years to develop in smokers, who absorb much larger amounts of the chemicals generated by tobacco combustion than bystanders do, the activists' accounts suggest that cigarette smoke defies the rules of toxicology, becoming more potent as the dose becomes smaller. Imagine what zero seconds of exposure could do.
I was reminded of this type of 'stretching the truth' when I read this yesterday in the Sunday Star Times;
Let's have a look at some other claims;
A New Zealand woman is killed by her (ex) partner every 2 ½ weeks. Stuff.
One woman is killed by her partner or ex-partner every five weeks. NZ Police.
Which should we go with?
2 comments:
Once a week is an absurd exaggeration. That would be 52 women. I checked the 2004/2005 murder rate for New Zealand and it was 45 people for the statistical year. That would mean more women were killed than total number of people killed. So every murder victim would be a woman plus another 7 that no body counted.
Now in the US about 80% of all victims of murder are male. If the same were true for NZ (and why would it be much different?) that would be around 9 or 10 women per year or around one every 5 weeks as the police said. In fact women are clearly being discriminated against here -- half the victims ought to be women. And since any gender disparity is automatically assumed by the Left to be a conscious decision then we can only assume that someone is plotting to kill off men and that men are victims of some horrible conspiracy.
Where's Ruth to take you to task for betraying the "sisterhood" yet again Lindsay?
You must be taken into custody and retrained in Fem-think at once!
;-)
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