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.

Pubs counter denormalisation

This is right. Reuben encourages the competition for best smoking area. (Although he has his reasons for not nominating any pubs.)

Pubs that have managed to carry on creating a hospitable environment for smokers are, in a certain sense, accomodating to the ban, but they are also resisting it. This is because the ban was not really about passive smoking but, rather about making smoking a more uncomfortable experience so as to push people into stopping.

Of course, the ban was about denormalisation, and furthering a script about secondary smoke that has spread round the world. This writer is right to appreciate any effort made to undermine this effort to demonise and marginalise smokers.

I can't really disagree with any of it:

One thing you will find these days is that politicians of all stripes will profess their desire to support pubs. Doing so is good politics. It’s a nod to British tradition, and to (understandable) nostalgia for a more communitarian epoch. But we are entitled to ask what kinds of pubs they wish to support. Judged by their policy, the political class seem to approve of pubs only insofar as they don’t let anyone smoke, don’t get too noisy and don’t encourage too much drinking. In other words, pubs transmogrified into beer serving starbucks outlets are what they are willing to support. And this is hardly the kind of environnent that will induce people to pay a premium over the prices in ASDA – and so its no surprise that for all the verbal publoving from our politicians, the industry is still in decline. If we want to save our pubs and clubs then we cannot simultaneously dragoon them into being part of the public health set up.

Here is a recent contribution to the pub debate from the Green Party in Scotland entitled Local pubs and small producers are the order of the day:

Politicians certainly like sounding tough on booze culture, but that doesn't offer the solution we need. Scotland does have a problem, but we think the solution lies in small businesses taking back some control. [... ] 

However, local pubs and craft brewers, whose interest lies in quality not quantity, have a great contribution to make to our communities, our economy and to a better relationship with alcohol. We don't need to let the multinationals and the big chains keep the upper hand. It's time to celebrate the alcohol culture we should have, and return the industry to a healthy state. 

We should be keeping the pub economy rooted in communities [...]

 All this stuff about community and local control is all very well, but doesn't allow publicans any control over their own smoking policy. Because smoking, say the Greens, isn't normal. I prefer Reuben's view.

The debate is over, is it?

The climate change debate has always been beyond me. I see too little of the world to be able to make meaningful comparisons about shifts in the weather. I am not a believer in anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Nor am I sceptic or a denier – I simply don't know. But when I hear the words 'the debate is over', this inclines me to the view that it most certainly isn't over and possibly hasn't been allowed to start.

It's what the US Surgeon General's (2006) report said about the dangers of passive smoking.

It's also over for the BBC, says James Delingpole, launching an attack with this interesting paragraph:

When the history of the greatest pseudoscience fraud in history  -aka “Climate Change” – comes to be written, no media organisation, not even the Guardian or the New York Times, will deserve greater censure than the steaming cess pit of ecofascist bias that is the BBC. That’s because, of all the numerous  MSM outlets which have been acting as the green movement’s useful idiots, the BBC is the only one which is taxpayer funded and which is required by its charter to adopt an ideologically neutral position.

You don't need to believe that this is the biggest pseudoscience fraud in history to realise that the BBC has a big credibility problem here, and Delingpole seeks to show that the BBC deliberately dropped its impartiality on the climate change debate, in what looks like an exercise in social marketing. 

How this was achieved is recounted in the report Submission to the Review of Impartiality and Accuracy of the BBC’s Coverage of Science, by Andrew Montford and Tony Newbery. Their report centres on a seminar held by the BBC in January 2006, under the title 'Climate Change – the Challenge to Broadcasting'. A report published by the BBC Trust the following year opined: 

The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus. [emphasis added]

To cut a long story short, there is little evidence of any 'scientific expert' at the conference at all, and two observers were appalled at the level of research that BBC personnel appeared to have done on the issue of climate change. The BBC also refused to reveal the identities of those attending the seminar under a Freedom of Information request, and legal clarification has been sought on the exemptions relied on by the BBC. It is quite unacceptable that a publicly funded body should seek to conceal the identity of participants in such a key seminar. 

The report's conclusions recommend (to the Review of Impartiality and Accuracy of the BBC's coverage of science) that due attention is paid to the BBC's commitment to impartiality and any necessary corrections are made to public records, and to why the participants of the seminar, many of whom were attached to environmental NGOs, were allowed to formulate BBC policy on climate change.

The Review is to be chaired by Professor Steve Jones and will report next Spring. I hope its report is thorough. 

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