Surgeon General: 'Second Hand Smoke Kills'
Main Category: Smoking / Quit SmokingAlso Included In: Lung Cancer; Cardiovascular / Cardiology; Public Health
Article Date: 29 Jun 2006 - 0:00 PDT
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The U.S. government's top doctor says the debate is over, second hand smoke is not a mere annoyance but a serious health hazard that leads to disease and premature death in children and non-smoking adults. "Second hand smoke kills people," stated Surgeon General Richard Carmona, citing a report issued this week.
Among the key points in the new 670-page study is that tens of thousands of Americans die each year as a result of involuntary smoking. Over 126 million people in the United States are regularly exposed to passive smoke. He said passive smoking causes lung cancer, cardiovascular disease and a host of other illnesses.
"One of the fastest-growing groups of lung-cancer patients are individuals in their early 40s who are non-smokers," according to Karen Giammicchio, R.N., Oncology Genetics/High Risk Coordinator at The Cancer Institute at Alexian Brothers Medical Center in Elk Grove Village, Illinois.
The likely culprit for lung cancer in these cases is exposure to an environmental risk factor, such as second hand smoke, Giammicchio says. "We know that all cancer is genetic, but there must be environmental exposure -- a gene-environment interaction -- to trigger cancer," she says. Second hand smoke is a key lung cancer catalyst.
"Smoke is toxic and full of poisons," says Charles Baum, M.D., Vice President of Health Affairs for the suburban Chicago-based Alexian Brothers Hospital Network. "There doesn't need to be massive levels of exposure when combined with a genetic predisposition to trigger cancer."
The Surgeon General's new report is providing additional evidence for supporters of smoking bans at work and in public places. Baum is a longtime advocate of smoking bans and increased cigarette taxes to discourage smoking and to improve community health. He actively supported a recent effort to ban smoking in public places and to hike licensing fees for cigarette retailers in several Chicago suburban communities, and separate measures that will ban smoking in public places across Cook County, Illinois, beginning in 2007. He wants to see a similar ban enacted statewide.
Experts with the Alexian Brothers Hospital Network encourages those who have been exposed to secondhand smoke -- or other environmental risks associated with lung cancer -- to visit their doctor and to undergo a lung scan. They offer the same advice to those who smoke, or have smoked with a family history of lung cancer, stating that early detection is imperative for long-term survival rates and curability.
Recently Alexian Brothers introduced the Alexian Lung Scan, a state-of- the-art CT screening that can detect the presence of tiny irregularities or nodules that are too small to be seen in a conventional X-ray. The lung scan, which lasts 20 seconds, identifies these abnormalities. A spirometry screening for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), such as emphysema and chronic bronchitis, is included with the lung scan. Alexian is providing the test free to the first 100 people who complete one of the network's smoking cessation programs.
The Cancer Institute at Alexian Brothers is operated by Alexian Brothers Hospital Network, which also includes Alexian Brothers Medical Center and Alexian Rehabilitation Hospital in Elk Grove Village, St. Alexius Medical Center and Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Hospital in Hoffman Estates, Illinois.
Alexian Brothers Hospital Network
http://www.alexianhealthsystem.org
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Surgeon General Is WRONG!!!
posted by bob on 2 Jul 2006 at 4:34 pm SECOND HAND SMOKE LIE
COLORADO IS joining 11 other states and Washington, D.C., in banning smoking in restaurants and bars, as if customers and workers couldn't decide for themselves if they wanted to spend time where tobacco fumes reside, and as if the owners of these establishments were something less than American citizens whose freedoms should be respected.
The legislators cannot be bothered by such trivialities — self-accountability, ha! — because they are too busy pretending they are on a noble life-saving mission. It doesn't dampen their enthusiasm to find they are widely applauded by a majority of their constituents who are non-smokers with easily offended nostrils and who are probably mostly ignorant of the most exhaustive research project ever completed on secondhand smoke.
The study involved 118,000 Californians. It followed their health history for four decades, and was conducted by highly respected scientists and published in the highly respected British Medical Journal. Here is what it said: There is no evidence of a "causal relationship" between "exposure" to tobacco smoke in the air around you and death. A "small effect" cannot be ruled out, the scientists reported, but that's it. Period.
On the other side is a once-ballyhooed 1993 "meta-analysis" — a study of a number of studies — by the Environmental Protection Agency. It didn't bother to protect the truth.
Careful commentators and even a court of law concurred that the study violated widely accepted statistical methods to arrive at conclusions the EPA had decided beforehand were in the public's best interests. It did not finally demonstrate that passive smoke causes cancer anymore than some more recent studies have shown that smoking bans in Helena, Mont., and Pueblo, Colo., dramatically decreased heart attacks.
The Helena study has been pretty thoroughly debunked by now. Its sample was tiny, the research effort was anorexic and the study didn't account for a similar decrease in a year prior to the ban. On the face of it, quick and substantial declines in heart attacks after a ban such as the one in Pueblo are much less likely to have a connection with the ban than to be a reflection of normal statistical ups and downs. This probability is brought home by a study of the heart-attack drops after smoking bans in states with a combined population of tens of millions, not in one community of tens of thousands. The finding? There was no overall drop.
Secondhand smoke almost certainly can have deleterious health consequences, but what both common sense and science tell us is that the extent of the threat depends on how concentrated the smoke is and whether you are sucking it in day after day, year after year. On the basis of testing, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration says it is rare to find a nook or cranny in any workplace with concentrations thick enough to be deemed dangerous.
None of the above is difficult to discover for anyone with access to the Internet and an inclination to get at the facts, raising the question of what might be going on with all these state and community bans, some of which even deny people the chance to light up outside.
It's politics in part — as legislators know, non-smoking voters love smoke-free zones — but it is also zealotry and a new Puritanism. Many anti-tobacco crusaders want so badly to waste this weed that they close their eyes to any argument that might get in the way, and great bunches of morally indignant modernists are intent on imposing their sophisticated values on everyone else, one of them being thou shalt not smoke.
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