Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction Message Board

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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction

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To: Cogito who wrote (52415)	10/24/2006 9:43:11 AM
From: J. C. Dithers	Read Replies (1) of 90947

I'd like to weigh in on your smoking discussion...... It is a pet peeve of mine that science, which is supposed to be totally objective and value free, often caves in to societal pressure to achieve a desired result. Proving that "second hand smoke kills" would be an extraordinarily difficult challenge. Given that the damage is insidious and occurs over a very long time, a scientist would have to study subjects over a period of years (a longitudinal study). During all this time, the scientist would have to control for, somehow, all the extraneous health hazards that subjects might have been exposed to. Only with such rigorous controls could smoke be isolated as the definitive cause of health damage. The task is just about impossible. John Stossel did a Dateline piece on the second hand smoke studies that have been done. He found that virtually all of them were done in homes where there were smokers and non-smokers. Such an environment involves intense and constant exposure, and does not replicate the work place or restaurant environments that are focus of the concern. (No one doubts that intense and constant exposure is harmful). Stossel characterized the "second hand smoke kills" belief as a myth. If you are interested, a while back I posted here about a very recent "scientific" study of pub workers in Scotland. One news station here had the audacity to claim that this study "settles once and for all the second hand smoke controversy." I pointed out how ridiculously flawed this study was. Message 22908326 I dislike smoking myself, but I am much more concerned about the general issue of bias in scientific studies.

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