Smoking and asthma
Yet another “study” has emerged.
This one really intrigued me though.
According to this “study” in Scotland, the rate of hospitalisations for children with asthma in Scotland has dropped by more than 18 per cent year-on-year since the introduction of the ban on smoking in public places in 2006.
The study even comes with graph to illustrate this startling decline –
Naturally various prominent sites in the UK have taken this “study” to task, and have correctly pointed out that the supplied figures show no such decline.
Out of curiosity, I tried replicating the graph above using the supplied figures.
That is the nearest I can get, which only bears a passing resemblance to the original.
Of course, the pro-choice lobby are up in arms about this and are screaming that once again figures are being distorted out of all recognition, and graphs are biased, loaded and just plain incorrect. I take a different view though.
Just suppose for one nanosecond that the figures are showing a decline, then what conclusions can we conclude? The Nazis are claiming that the smoking ban is the cause of the decline, but how do they come to this conclusion?
The study refers to children, so we must look at the children’s environment in relation to smoking. Where are children most likely to encounter smoke? Do children frequent pubs and bars? I don’t think so. They are usually to be found at home, at school or in the open air. I think we can safely take the open air out of the equation, and also schools. I can’t imagine that all teachers smoked heavily in the classroom before the ban? That just leaves the home.
Since the ban was introduced, it is widely recognised that attendance in pubs has dropped dramatically. One must assume that the majority of the population has not suddenly decided to give up drinking because of a smoking ban, and judging by the increase in off-licence sales, we can only assume that people are now drinking [and smoking] at home. But home is the only place where children are likely to encounter significant smoke, which [if the study is correct] indicates that an increase in smoking in the home has led to a decrease in the levels of asthma in children.
In my travels around the Interweb I have come across quite a few anecdotal reports of asthma sufferers discovering that smoking reduces, or even clears their asthma, so the above conclusion may not be quite so outlandish as it first appears.
Leastwise, the Nazis have produced their “study” and analysis therefore can only point to one of two conclusions. Either they have cooked the figures, or they are indicating that smoking reduces the incidence of asthma.
Which is it?
One way or another, I think they have nicely shot themselves in the foot?
Your argument sounds logical but doesn’t wash . As we have become aware of the health risks the number of smokers has fallen dramatically over the past years so fewer people are smoking in houses. Also, a lot of smokers are choosing to smoke outside their own homes. (It stops the house smelling so bad when visitors come.) Furthemore, I suspect that many smokers have decided to totally quit following the pub ban.
The end result I imagine has been less smoke in homes means fewer asthma attacks.
Healthier kids. What’s wrong with that ?
TT – I don’t see why they don’t wash? I agree that the number of smokers has dropped drematically over the last years/decades, but what you don’t mention is that over that period there has been a significant increase in asthma cases. While I agree that some smokers smoke outside their own homes, I very much doubt that they are in a majority, but that is a personal opinion.
Of course I am all for healthier kids [I never said otherwise], but before you equate reduced smoking to reduced asthma, take a look at this. I’m not the only one coming up with apparently outlandish ideas.
Jeez GD I don’t understand half the words never mind the gist of it !
All I can say is that if you think that being in a room of smokers isn’t going to aggravate asthma then I guess you never had it. Still, carry on with your life’s work old buddy. Also, I know a lot of smokers here who go outside their own homes to smoke, but that may be something to do with the climate. In a lot of homes only one person smokes. So I guess they deem it a common courtesy to go outside.
Christ on a bike, these studies really get on your tits these days. “Studies” have proved that only two of the three blind mice were actually blind. “Studies” have proved that Jack did not in fact go up the hill with Jill but waited at the bottom for her. And “studies” have shown that humpty dumpty was in fact pushed off the wall.
What next FFS.
Oh, and by the way, the auld 5,000 mile service seems to have worked. Amazing what a new set of spark plugs can do.
TT – Heh!! The key part is the second last sentence – “These results […] may explain the lower risk of allergic diseases in smokers.” It is a known fact that nicotine has medicinal benefits but the hysteria surrounding the smoking has meant that mention of that fact is suppressed. Take a look at this one. [slightly easier to understand?!]. Society has been so brainwashed that people find it absolutely impossible to believe that nicotine may have any benefits at all.
Mossy – All the time they keep coming up with shite “science”, I shall continue to get annoyed.
Can’t be arsed anymore. I got work to do. Smoking kills and you’re daft !
And if it wasn’t for science you wouldn’t have a compurter to bitch about science on.
pubs were supposed to be for relaxing in having a few beers with your mates. No we have to put up with kids running amok, screaming and shouting. Why cant we go back to the good old spit and sawdust pubs.
Patricia Hewitt stated to the UK parliament in 2006 that 95% of second hand smoke ‘suffered’ occurred in private homes. Since the smoking ban, that must surely now be close to 100%, and probably the ONLY place kids would now smell it. How taking away a small percentage of SHS, in places kids mostly didn’t go, is going to be the sole cause of an 18% drop (in one year out of the 4 since the ban in Scotland) is a mystery. Yes, it’s our old friend junk science again. I think even TT would concede that this study is pretty shonky.
They will accept your argument that smoking in the home is the major source of exposure and use it to ban smoking in private homes. Don’t think it can happen? Wait and see.
TT
I am afraid the earth is round. In 2008 this paper was produced in America and concludes that nictotine and hence active smoking and passive smoking leads to less asthma. It also gives the aetiology (causation) why nicotine and the biologial process that reduces asthma in recipients.
The results unequivocally show that, even after multiple allergen sensitizations, nicotine dramatically suppresses inflammatory/allergic parameters in the lung including the following: eosinophilic/lymphocytic emigration; mRNA and/or protein expression of the Th2 cytokines/chemokines IL-4, IL-5, IL-13, IL-25, and eotaxin; leukotriene C4; and total as well as allergen-specific IgE. unequivocally show that, even after multiple allergen sensitizations, nicotine dramatically suppresses inflammatory/allergic parameters in the lung including the following: eosinophilic/lymphocytic emigration; mRNA and/or protein expression of the Th2 cytokines/chemokines IL-4, IL-5, IL-13, IL-25, and eotaxin; leukotriene C4; and total as well as allergen-specific IgE. ”
http://www.jimmunol.org/cgi/content/abstract/180/11/7655
While it may not be necessarily healthy, its ridiculous how far people will go. Even smoking alternatives get the hit. They came out with electronic cigs, which I believe don’t even contain tobacco, and some people started complaining about those, regardless that they use vapor (Although, it did appear that some of them, namely from China IIRC could have some unhealthy stuff in them, still, seems like a risk for the person alone, and solvable by using reputable suppliers.) Then they started complaining about the dis solvable tobacco tablets you stick in your mouth (Obviously, this produces no smoke, but who cares when you can find another way to bitch about it?) the argument for that was it was “packaged like candy” and could appeal to children. Now, they don’t want cigs to be labeled as menthol, full flavor, light, etc. Instead, they want them to use colors instead. What the hell sense does that make?
It seems like they’ll hate tobacco in general regardless of the method used anyway. Then there were some people who used to smoke, or smoked, and later died, tobacco was blamed even though there were other factors with a dominant hand in it. So now what? Well, now you can barely smoke anywhere. Here we can’t smoke indoors anymore, because of the state’s bullshit, so you can’t smoke in a bar or restaurant unless its a whole separate room with separate ventilation system. The restaurant and/or customers had no say in this, and the few places that did try to let people smoke, the government and its infinite wisdom comes to crackdown on them. Even with this law in effect, its already not good enough, people act like its some huge travesty to even smoke outdoors. What more do they want? The smoke is out in open air. Then there was secondhand smoke, but that wasn’t bad enough, so now there is third hand smoke. Is there a fourth hand smoke yet? I guess that would mean if you smoke, then shake someones hand, they now are also walking nuclear bombs! What about if fifth hand smoke, where whenever you walk, your footprints leave behind fifth hand smoke! Wow, I hope I didn’t give them any ideas.
I say, tobacco is also probably numero uno for “sin tax”, and what’s next when they’re done with tobacco? There’s already some people in support of a “sin tax” on coffee, soda, hamburgers, etc. There’s a study on everything nowadays and damn near everything is bad for you, the sun is bad for you, fruit juice is bad for your teeth (We gonna ban that too? Obviously the children are at risk!), tanning beds are bad for you (And of course, what’d ya know? talk of taxes on that too). I really wish people would just shutup, because I get tired of the endless studies on how bad everything is for you. Even shit that is natural.
Okay, I went off on a little bit of a tangent I suppose, sorry about that.
Other thoughts:
The pro-legalisation movement for Marijuana would probably see some of this same crap, so I wonder if that’d ever happen. I can see it now! Oh, that man smoked a joint! I’m being exposed to his THIRD HAND marijuana smoke! See how that works?
Woosh – Holy God! That is quite an opening speech, and you are all the more welcome for it. I think we are both singing from the same hymn sheet here. I have been saying all along that as soon as the Nazis get bored with tobacco, they will turn their attention to food, drink and whatever else they deem to be bad for us.
Fuckit. After reading that lot I need to relax. Time to roll one, I think?
Grandad and excellent breakdown of jills jilting propaganda study…….
The Nazis have indeed moved on to obesity. In Amerika Michelle obama is now the head reichs Fuhrer of anti-obesity. Miss Nazi pelosi recently raided the food stamp program of billions of dollars to finance the war on fat folks.
The money is to be used to finance the same style propaganda studies as whats been produced over the last years on second hand smoke. I just saw a study this morning blaming obesity as a factor in childhood asthma…..same game plan and same folks doing the junk science.
Poor Metabolism Hikes Childhood Asthma Risk
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Pediatrics/Asthma/22257
Metabolic problems, most likely due to poor diet early in life, are linked to asthma risk even in normal weight children, researchers found.
Children with asthma in a cross-sectional study were more likely to have elevated triglycerides and the dark skin rash indicative of developing insulin resistance than nonasthmatics across all body mass index groups.
This relationship with asthma prevalence remained significant after controlling for BMI and other factors, Giovanni Piedimonte, MD, of West Virginia University School of Medicine in Morgantown, and colleagues reported online in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care
Medicine.
Like I was saying a simple google of the so called researchers involved quickly show they are also involved in anti-tobacco research……
Heres a quick look at the researchers in the study above:
*Correspondence to: Giovanni Piedimonte, MD, Department of Pediatrics, ….. patients heavily exposed to second–hand smoke. Interest- Heres the other
Jun 7, 2010 … Healthy adults exposed to secondhand smoke appear to be at higher risk … Reviewed by Dori F. Zaleznik, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of …
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Psychiatry/GeneralPsychiatry/20529
Heres the other in the above asthma study:
Jun 7, 2010 … Healthy adults exposed to secondhand smoke appear to be at higher … Dori F. Zaleznik, MD, and Chris Emery, and Dorothy Caputo, MA, RN, …
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Psychiatry/GeneralPsychiatry/20529
As you can see the tobacco control people keep their favorites well funded as long as they produce junk science for the REICH!
Whether its obesity or tobacco,its basicallt always the same folks involved,collusion you bet!
A nice bit of research there, Harley. One thing that is fairly obvious is that the medical profession hasn’t a clue what causes a load of ailments, so the simplest answer is to blame them all on smoking, obesity, alcohol or whatever is flavour of the month. Lazy shower of bastards!
Did you miss this beauty ?
Monday, 27 October, by Dave Atherton
The devil has soon found work for idle hands. I was wondering on what basis ideologically they want to do it. The EU and its health committe has recently ruled that passive smoking is harmless and it involves the death of a M Labate who died of lung cancer whilt being an employee of the EU. Mr Labate was an official with the Commission for 29 years, during which time he was exposed to a large amount of second-hand tobacco smoke. He was declared permanently invalid following the discovery of the lung cancer which subsequently led to his death. He submitted a request for recognition of the illness as an occupational disease reads an ECJ paper. Here is the conclusion from the European Commission’s in-house medics: “While acknowledging Mr Labate’s exposure to second hand tobacco smoke and finding no other cause for his lung cancer, the Medical Committee in its decision nonetheless stated that it could not establish with certainty the connection with his professional activities.” “The Commission accordingly denied the request, following the finding by the Medical Committee that the connection between the disease and Mr Labate’s professional activities was not sufficiently established.” And, thus the judgement from the EU court tribunal: “The claims for compensation… by Mrs Labate are dismissed as manifestly unfounded”.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/bruno_waterfield/blog/2008/07/23/eu_cigarette_bans_smoke_without_fire.
The applicant, Mrs. Kay Labate, widow of former European Commission official Mario Labate, on her own behalf and on behalf of her husband’s estate, contests the Commission’s decisions refusing to recognise the lung cancer of her husband as an occupational disease.
Mr Labate was an official with the Commission for 29 years, during which time he was exposed, according to the Applicant, to a large amount of secondhand tobacco smoke. He was declared permanently invalid following the discovery of the lung cancer which subsequently led to his death. He submitted a request for recognition of the illness as an occupational disease.
So, given that the EU is declaring war on smokers for health reasons, will it, in fact, admit that it may have helped kill Mr Labate?
Er, no:
While acknowledging Mr Labate’s exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke and finding no other cause for his lung cancer, the Medical Committee in its decision nonetheless stated that it could not establish with certainty the connection with his professional activities. The Commission accordingly denied the request, following the finding by the Medical Committee that the connection between the disease and Mr Labate’s professional activities was not sufficiently established.
“The claims for compensation submitted in the letter of 25 October 2007 by Mrs Labate are dismissed as manifestly unfounded”
So, the EU is claiming that the only possible cause of his death was secondary smoke, and even though he spent most of his waking life at work (as we all do!) … somehow they are not responsible in any way for his death!
and, of course:
1998 W.H.O study coordinated by its International Agency for Research on Cancer (2nd largest authoritative report on ETS) concluded “no evidence that there was any ‘statistically significant’ additional risk from exposure to pasive smoke either at home or in the workplace”.
You will remember when Mickey Martin claimed the smoking ban was being introduced to save 3,000 lives a year and went on to talk about ETS (That Horseshit). The Nation could have been forgiven for thinking that 3,000 innocent non-smoking souls were going clogs up, in mid flight, because evil bastards around them lit a smoke. Not satisfied with this, the fanatics at the Irish Heart Foundation doubled the risk and called it 6,000 innocents a year being murdered by vicious smokers. Not to be outdone in the hysterics stakes, the stormtroopers of ASH upped the ante and claimed that 7,000 innocent clean living precious children were being ruthlessly buggered, tortured and slaughtered. Of course, the slew of pious white coats who voiced these inaneties, came from “The Caring Profession” – the bastards !!
So, I’m surprised you didn’t pick up on the following article. All is not as it seems !!!!
8,000 deaths from medical mishaps
Me: (“those self same fucking white coats”)
By Evelyn Ring – Irish Examiner
Friday, April 23, 2010
THERE may be up to 8,000 deaths every year as a result of medical negligence and medical accidents in Irish hospitals, a major conference on clinical and medical negligence heard yesterday.
Patient Focus’s Jim Reilly said the figure was based on international evidence and indicated that a major culture shift was needed in Ireland’s healthcare system.
The conference was organised by Action Against Medical Accidents (AvMA), supported by Patient Focus.
The patient support groups said a legal “duty of candour” must be enforced so healthcare organisations had to be open and sincere with patients when things went wrong.
Medical negligence legal expert Michael Boylan said international evidence suggested that 4% of Irish patients are injured due to medical accidents. With more than four million hospital admissions or treatments every year, the injury rate of 4% equated to 160,000 patients.
Mr Boylan claimed the State Claims Agency saw its primary, if not sole, responsibility to minimise the financial exposure to the state as a consequence of medical accident claims.
“In this context it is, therefore, not surprising that there is a huge deficit between the policy of ‘openness’ being suggested in publications from the Department of Health, the Health Service Executive and medical organisations and how those ‘policies’ are implemented on the ground,” he said.
The head of the State Claims Agency’s clinical indemnity scheme, Dr Ailis Quinlan, who addressed the conference said the agency endorsed the concept of open communication.
She pointed out that obstetrics accounted for 20% of claims reported to the agency last year and about 60% of the cost involved and that had not changed. Surgery accounted for 23% of claims, while medicine accounted for 22%.
Dr Quinlan said the StarsWeb 2009 statistics showed slips, trips and falls accounted for the majority of incidents reported, at 32%, with treatment incidents accounting for 7% of reported incidents.
“We have always estimated that up to about 150,000 patients a year could be affected, but it is a wide spectrum of incidents ranging from the very, very minor near misses to the catastrophic adverse events, like deaths,” she said.
Dr Quinlan said almost 84,000 adverse events were reported last year.
Of 307,000 incidents notified to the scheme since 2004, 3,754 have resulted in claims being made.
“Last year we had 510 new claims and at any one time we have about 1,500 active claims,” said Dr Quinlan.
That’s 8,000 innocent dozy-holes who enter into the “care” of our white coated “professionals” every year get killed. And if you are one of the 160,000 a year who survive the “treatment”, you only end up injured. Remember of course, that the original intentionm was a cure.
To put that into perspective, not a single human being anywhere on the planet …… ever …… has been pronounced dead due to inhaling smoke from a cigarette.
Yet, 8,000 a year, in this country alone, prematurely shuffle off this mortal, because the white coat fucked up. These are the very white coats with large pockets to accomodate the largesse of the Pharmaceutical Industry, in return for spouting horseshit to scare us into buying expensive nicotine drugs, manufactured by the self same Pharma’s.
Where do you even begin with a scandal like that.
I can only suspect that they’d like to kill the pub trade because the boozer is the one place we’d meet, compare notes and collectively cope on to the fuckers !
John Mallon
I did have a heated conversation with a nosey bastard once who couldn’t watch me enjoy a pint and a cigarette outdoors without taking it upon himself to interrupt my peace so that he could deliver a nasty lecture on smoking in general and me in particular.
He started his diatribe by introducing himself as a Doctor which apparently to his mind, made it perfectly logical for him to accost a total stranger, uninvited and deliver a stern lecture to me on my lifestyle choices.
Well coined phrases such as “fuck off ya tramp”, danced on my lips, but given my fine upbringing, I took his tirade on the chin to humour him. I didn’t pull him up once on his lies about ETS, I let him away with ascribing every known ailment to the tobacco plant and barely blinked when he described the long horrible painful death that I was probably due in the next few days.
But, when this was having no obvious effect on me and I was patiently waiting for the weirdo to shag off, he changed his tack and suggested that I was both “smelly & dirty” That got a reaction. “No, you dillusional fruitcake”, I replied heatedly, “hospitals are smelly and dirty and I’m not surprised with lame wankers like you running them”.
The man was fit, I’ll say that for him. An overweight middle-aged medic, shot across the pub lawn like a scalded cat. As I mused later over another cigarette, I thought, “It’s important that both sides of the debate should air their views in a full and frank manner like that”.