Tuesday 1 November 2011

Voluntary restrictions on smoking to the rescue of family pets: epidemiology

From the University of Glasgow comes a professor, Clare Knottenbelt, who wishes to warn the public about the dangers of exposing their pets to secondary smoke. Her website page at the University of Glasgow admits the lack of any clear evidence of a link between secondary smoke exposure and illness in dogs and cats – or at least that it is hard to elucidate, which is much the same thing. The professor's study was funded by the British Small Animals Veterinary Association – not part of the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies, but apparently still willing to fund studies without very much medical benefit.

There seems little real appetite for further smoking restrictions to be made law, but it seems that pressure will grow, for as long as anti-smoking interests hold sway, on parents and pet-owners to desist from smoking near children and pets. Since children and pets have remained at 'life-threatening' risk for over five years since the smoking ban was introduced to 'save the workers', it is hard to imagine that the risks are real. If secondary smoke is so dangerous to the young, who can't choose where they spend time (as anti-smokers never tire of telling us) the best course of action would have been to campaign against smoking in the home, rather than against smoking in the workplace – much of it being out of bounds to kids for most of the time).

As explained in the video below there is no measurable study of secondary smoke that demonstrates harm.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is there nothing that these Universities will not do to prostitute themselves for the Anti-smoking lobby?

To present a paper that that cotains no actual facts regarding second hand smoke and pets and present it as a warning that it does makes the the entire study fraudalent, which as is well known, is the hallmark of all anti-smoking literiture.

Anyone who knows anything about animals already know that they have remarkable instincts of self preservation, if the aninmal itself felt there was any danger then its fight or flee instincts would engage then it would either fight or run away from the source of the danger and since smoke is in fact a major trigger for the fight or flight response our family pets would have deserted us centuries ago!

Clearly then Domestic animals can differentiate between tobacco smoke and smoke from other sources, equally clearly the domestic animal itself does not consider tobacco smoke to be a threat or it would run as it's wild cousins do.

Belinda said...

too right anon. I think they're quite good at making people feel overly susceptible to infections as well.