Decision puts tobacco exposure in same category as diesel exhaust, arsenic - CA
Didn't many well publicized previous studies prove that breast cancer was the one type they could not even begin to remotely relate in any way to smoking? Is this just another gimmick to propel more smoking bans?
Is it legitimate to state that the U.S. Surgeon General's report carries less authority than the California EPA's?
That finding conflicts with a 2004 report by the U.S. Surgeon General. Sanford Barsky, a UC, Los Angeles, researcher writing on behalf of the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company, told the board the report "either ignores mentioning or does not give the appropriate weight to studies which refute this association" between secondhand smoke and breast cancer.
Garnet Dawn
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http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11048609/#storyContinued
Calif. declares secondhand smoke a pollutant
Decision puts tobacco exposure in same category as diesel exhaust, arsenic
MSNBC News Services
Updated: 8:01 a.m. ET Jan. 27, 2006
SACRAMENTO - California became the first state to declare secondhand smoke a toxic air pollutant Thursday, citing its link to breast cancer. Experts said the decision may have more impact worldwide than it does in the largely smoke-free state.
The decision by the California Air Resources Board puts environmental tobacco smoke in the same category as diesel exhaust, arsenic and benzene.
Scientific studies in recent years have warned about the health impact from second-hand smoke and linked it to a wide array of ailments including heart disease, lung cancer and other respiratory ailments, as well as breast cancer.
“I think there is no question that this puts California way ahead,” said John Froines, chairman of the Air Resources Board’s Scientific Review Panel.
“To actually have the major air pollution agency in the state of California to list ETS (environmental tobacco smoke) as a toxic air contaminant is going to have immense impact, we think, in terms of public education around other states,” he said. “It will clearly lead to regulatory changes within the state.”
The unanimous decision relied on a September report that found a sharply increased risk of breast cancer in young women exposed to secondhand smoke. It also links drifting smoke to premature births, asthma and heart disease, other cancers, and numerous health problems in children.
"If people are serious about breast cancer, they have to deal with secondhand smoke. That's what this is all about," said Dr. Stanton Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control, Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco. He reviewed the science behind Thursday's decision. "This is a seminal, international document. It's impossible to underestimate what a big deal this is."
Effects of passive smoke
The report by scientists at California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment draws on more than 1,000 other studies of the effects of passive smoke. It blamed secondhand smoke for 4,000 deaths each year in California from lung cancer or heart disease alone.
The most significant new finding is that young women exposed to secondhand smoke increase their risk of developing breast cancer between 68 percent and 120 percent. The disease kills about 40,000 women in the United States each year.
That finding conflicts with a 2004 report by the U.S. Surgeon General. Sanford Barsky, a UC, Los Angeles, researcher writing on behalf of the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company, told the board the report "either ignores mentioning or does not give the appropriate weight to studies which refute this association" between secondhand smoke and breast cancer.
California scientists say their research is more current than the Surgeon General's report. The California report went through an exhaustive review that delayed its release for nearly a year but ensures it is based on sound research, said Dr. John Froines, director of UCLA's Center for Occupational and Environmental Health and head of the scientific review panel.
R.J. Reynolds spokesman David Howard said regardless of the dangers from passive smoke indoors, no research supports regulators' decision to declare it an air pollutant.
"No studies exist that show that exposure outdoors leads to any increased risk of tobacco-associated illness," he said.
Next, the air board must consider regulatory steps to reduce exposure, a process that could take years.
"This is no longer some crazy, California, Left Coast way of thinking," said Cynthia Hallett, executive director of Berkeley-based Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights. She cited smoking bans that have been enacted or are being considered across the nation and in other countries.
Growing tobacco bans
The decision in the California state capital kicks off a process that will likely take two or three years as officials study ways to reduce exposure to second-hand smoke.
A spokeswoman for tobacco giant Philip Morris USA, a unit of Altria Group Inc., declined to comment.
In 1994, California became the first U.S. state to bar smoking in the workplace, and then followed up with bans on smoking in restaurants and bars. Other American cities and states have since adopted similar prohibitions.
Several California cities have enacted wider bans, such as San Francisco, which now prohibits smoking in city parks, and Los Angeles, which bars smoking at piers and beaches.
The effect is likely to be greatest outside of California, which already bans smoking in or near most public buildings, including bars and restaurants. Much of the initial effort in California will focus on public education emphasizing the scientific findings and Thursday's air board decision, said Paul Knepprath, vice president for government relations at the American Lung Association of California.
The association unsuccessfully pushed legislation in 2003 that would have banned smoking in motor vehicles containing young children, and could try for a similar law next year, Knepprath said.
The association may also push for nonsmoking floors or wings in apartment buildings, much as hotels offer smoke-free areas, Knepprath said.
"People live in apartments all across California who are exposed to secondhand smoke on a daily basis," Knepprath said. "It drifts from a common area or another apartment."
Hallett said that could one day force regulations requiring separate ventilation systems for smoking and nonsmoking apartments.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report
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Jan 29, 2006
Decision puts tobacco exposure in same category as dies...
A very helpful letter from Michael:
Glantz got together with several actual medical researchers in some sort of conference setting a few months ago (there's a transcript floating around the internet somewhere that I read but lost track of for now) and pushed the argument that for one particular type of breast cancer (premenopausal) the statistics showed a correlation with smoke exposure. My memory of the transcript isn't perfect, but I believe it was largely Glantz who argued that smoking in "large" doses fiddled with estrogen output and thereby lowered a woman's chance for postmenopausal breast cancer (despite supposedly increasing the risks by itself if one balanced the estrogen thing) but that because estrogen levels weren't so important in premenopausal breast cancer or because the lower exposure didn't jiggle them that the effect of the smoke became more important.In a message dated 1/29/2006 4:50:31 PM Eastern Standard Time, garnetdawn@comcast.net writes:
Didn't many well publicized previous studies prove that breast cancer was the one type they could not even begin to remotely relate in any way to smoking? Is this just another gimmick to propel more smoking bans?
They have at least a SMALL degree of theoretical basis/justification for their argument, but in my judgment (and remember, I don't even play a doctor on TV...) it's pretty small. Secondary smoke exposure cross-correlates with all sorts of other stuff: drinking, sex, drug use, likelihood of pregnancy, probably dietary food choices, etc etc etc. Knowing the leanings of Stan Glantz, and the GREAT desirability for the Antis of being able to make a claim that they could focus on threatening our little female children who are being "forced" to work in "toxic tobacco smoke polluted environments", I would seriously doubt that there was a lot of effort put into correcting for confounders.
Over the past 15 years or so the Antismokers moved into a new phase in their research activities. At some point at one of their conferences they confronted the problem that young people were generally not worrying about getting cancer at age 70. They decided that they needed to find things that young folks would worry about and produce research that would reach that target group. The suggestions were along the lines of "smoking makes your breath smell" and "smoking makes it harder to get dates" (see: http://www.ashtraymouth.com/dialupPage.aspx for an example of this aimed at a young age group), "smoking makes you impotent" and "smoking gives you early wrinkles" and "smoking will make you fat"
It's been a case of "Ask, and thou shalt receive." The research money was pumped in, the studies were designed, and the eventual results interpreted and misinterpreted from here to get out the gang, and now we've got billboards, TV ads, and scary sounding news articles about all those things. (Yeah, they've actually tried the fat one: called it "Teenage Mesomorphic Syndrome" or somesuch).
The breast cancer / ETS combo falls nicely along these lines because breast cancer is something even teenage girls start worrying about nowadays. Throw in the great double punch of parents worrying about their little girls getting breast cancer from waitressing and there's a LOT of motivation to create this impression regardless of how shaky the science might be. The "cute little girl waitress" impression gets used to outlaw smoking in bars and strip clubs.
Remember: these are the folks who gave us Helena... they have NO compunction about misleading people in the name of "the greater good" of reducing/eliminating smoking.
Several other things in the article are worth noting as well: "Dr." Stanton Glantz has been given a "Professor of Medicine" title at the school he brings so much money to, but his "Dr."ate is actually Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering.... not medicine... something that an organ as supposedly responsible as the AP should have noted itself. Also, the article notes that breast cancer kills about 40,000 women in the U.S. each year. It fails to note what portion of these are pre-menopausal breast cancers (the only kind this study makes a claim for) but I believe it's down around 10%, i.e. 4,000. Even if the effect claimed by Glantz were true, by the time one adjusted for confounders and for proportion of women "exposed" etc the numbers "caused" by such exposure would likely be a lot closer to 400 than 40,000.
My own, admittedly non-medically-professional belief, is that the real numbers are more likely zero or close to it. By "close to it" I mean that any that DID exist are probably down in the same rough range as the numbers caused by drinking tap water or living in Los Angeles in general... and significantly less than the excess risk entailed by holding off on pregnancy till after age 30!
- Michael
Michael J. McFadden
Author of "Dissecting Antismokers' Brains"
Mid-Atlantic Regional Director of The Smoker's Club, Inc.
web page: http://pasan.thetruthisalie.com/
mailto: Cantiloper@aol.com
