Stoptober and its fallacies

The UK has an abundance of wealth to spend on silly stunts like this one.



Dame Sally Davies (CMO) urges us to realise that apart from the financial cost to the country, the cost to individuals is the real issue that people should be thinking about. She tells us that 1,260 people a day are admitted to hospital with smoking-related diseases, It is tiresome to point out what has been said many times: that smoking-related diseases are not necessarily caused by smoking. Consider this graph from the World Health Organisation (h/tip Fredrik Eich at Alternative Analysis). Given the low rate of lung cancer deaths in Mexico compared with Scotland, it would seem that there many factors at play other than smoking.


(Legend reads: blue, approximate population in hundreds ages 70–74; orange, deaths from lung cancer ages 70–74.)

In explaining any respiratory problems resulting from air pollution, the burning of fossil fuels merits consideration, especially in the light of reports that UK levels of such emissions have broken European guidelines for years. Only Dame Sally Davies knows why smoking is such a focus of attention, rather than extraordinary levels of emissions, and why the medical establishment repeatedly refers to smoking as a 'preventable cause' of cancer, when considered on a population-wide basis it is not preventable (certainly not more than most other causes of cancer), nor is it necessarily an exceptionally significant cause of cancer or other 'smoking-related' diseases. Do the funders of studies on tobacco allow researchers to conclude that fossil fuel emissions are a factor in respiratory and heart health?

The assault on parents continues

Yesterday another advertisement appeared on the television on secondary smoke exposure in the home. The BBC also interviewed the Chief Medical Officer beside a parent whose son's asthma recovery was put down to her success in giving up smoking.

The CMO declares that 80 per cent of smoke is invisible (yes, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and water vapour are invisible). She also scoffs at the idea that other pollutants are a significant problem, claiming that the UK meets European standards and that tobacco smoke adds 'dramatically' to pollution levels.

There has never been a satisfactory answer to why governments have waited six years after the smoking ban in public places to remind us how vulnerable children are and to mount sustained campaigns regarding smoking in the home. Rather than an authentic health campaign, this resembles more an attempt to extend the bounds of what kinds of intervention are politically acceptable, starting with 'public' and progressing to domestic.

Dave Atherton has written an open letter to Dame Sally Davies (CMO) and Professor Terence Stephenson, Head of Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. This spells out more of the fallacies behind the current campaign.