Parents driving with children in the car, all the windows closed, smoke as thick as a saloon. Parents smoking around infants and then wondering why the Lord claimed them with SIDS. Parents not taking little Sally to the pediatrician because they don’t want to hear how their chain smoking is responsible for her chronic bronchitis, ear infections, asthma or even cancer. I suppose it could be seen as a horrible function of natural selection. Now we are seeing legal rulings where children are removed from a smoking household, and preferance given to a non-smoking parent over a smoker in custody rulings. The level of nicotine in a child’s blood can be measured like any other drug, and the results used as evidence in court. These same kids may survive to have twice the cancer rate later on, when mom and dad are being kept alive on respirators attached to tracheotomy holes in their throats. I’m waiting for the excuses: “It’s not like I blow it in her face.” “My mother and father smoked and look, I’m fine, <hack>.” “All those lies about smoke being bad for you is made up by nosy snobs who want to tell everyone how to live!” “Hey, even milk and breathing are bad for you. Breathing air pollution is bad. What’re gonna do?” (crushes out cigarette on the carpet)
So, is causing children to breathe second-hand cigarette child abuse?
Wow!Virgowitch those are extreme examples you give…
I wonder how you feel toward, let’s say, parents who smoke in their childrens presence, but with the window rolled down as they drive, or outside? Is that child abuse? I think your examples warrant charges of neglect, perhaps even abuse in extreme cases. However, consider someone who is addicted to nicotine and just tries to minimize the exposure?
With the information available today, smoking around kids is a Very Bad Thing. When my parents smoked around me, and when I was younger and smoked around my kids, the same information was not freely available.
I also think your vitriol would be better aimed at the tobacco companies and their continued lies and denial of responsibility,Virgowitch , rather than the unfortunate people addicted to their product which is available legally in every country around the world as far as I am aware, and is still promoted at every opportunity the tobacco companies see.
It is simply remarkable that your post followed mine!
From the column I cited:
"The controversy over ETS and the EPA report has been marked by accusations of conspiracy, bias, and cooked data, so one has to tread carefully. Nonetheless, a few tentative conclusions can be drawn. The first is that under the most charitable interpretation the EPA’s evidence that ETS is carcinogenic comes perilously close to noise level–you’re not sure if you’re seeing a real effect or just random spikes in the data. The EPA report was based not on original research but on a “meta-analysis” of 11 existing studies; the analysis purported to show that ETS caused a 19 percent increased risk of lung cancer. While this seems like a respectably large number, remember it comes from an epidemiological study, which attempts to infer causality based on associations in the data–circumstantial evidence rather than a smoking gun. Whatever song and dance you may get from the statisticians, skeptical observers prefer to see an increased risk of at least 100 percent before they consider a relationship to be established beyond reasonable doubt.
The tobacco industry claims the EPA had to fudge the numbers just to arrive at 19 percent. For example, in calculating the probabilities, the agency used a “confidence interval” of 90 percent rather than the more stringent (and in my observation more common) 95 percent. The lower the standard, the more statistically significant your results can be made to seem."
Of course if we’re going to cite Cecil as an authority:
(Emphasis added.)
The column seems more focused on the question of whether or not second-hand smoke (or “environmental tobacco smoke” or “ETS”) is a danger to adult nonsmokers.
Again, just going by Cecil’s column, he says it is a danger to children. I confess I don’t know why this would be so–their little lungs are still developing? ETS will stunt their growth?–mainly, I’m just pointing out that the column doesn’t necessarily support the position on behalf of which it is being appealed to.
But that entire section from which you lifted your quote is an expression of Cecil’s personal preferences and anectdotal experience:
“Let me begin by saying that I’m allergic to tobacco smoke, and laws against smoking in public places have personally benefited me. In principle I don’t have a problem with banning public smoking…” and then your quote.
Once we have passed beyond the rather irrelevant — though famously entertaining — Cecil schtick, we get into the evidence I cited that the EPA cooked the statistics in order to skew its findings.
i understand that the following is anecdotal and really proves nothing, but when my mother passed away at 82 from heart failure the doctor checked the box on his official paperwork denoting that the death was smoking related. when i questioned this by stating that mom had quit smoking 20 years before, he said that he considered it contributory. i asked if this opinion inflated the smoking death statistics, he said yes and that it should.
i was pretty busy at that moment, so i did not continue the discussion, but thinking about it later made me wonder how his data affected the statistics and how wide spread is this type of reporting.
I am not suprised, if anything has made me fear the “mob” it is the social resources that have slowly been brought to bear on smoking. The kind of vitrol that is exemplified by the OP is just one example of the effects. SIDS? Cancer in a child? Come on. I’d ask for some cites but I am almost afraid what someone might be able to find. The public conscience is not scientific, it merely takes its cues from science and then stretches the results beyond recognition. The solution? Well the solution is obvious VirgoWitch, seeing as SHS is just one source of cargcinogen among many, in order to be a good and decent parent you must raise your child in a bubble.
If that is true by your facts alone, I, my sister, and my children should be dead.
We’re not and we’re quite healthy. None of us had more than one ear infection (if any), no asthma, cancer, respiratory problems or allergies. We’re not overweight and my mom who is now 77 years old, has never had problems with high blood pressure, etc. My dad recently passed away at the age of 82. He had a stroke. I don’t consider death at age 82 to be a premature death due to smoking or eating fried foods for years.
I have not lost any high school friends (and their children) to cancer, etc., who also match the profile I mentioned above. The picture you’re attempting to paint is not reflected in the real life around me.
It’s been awhile since I have done any serious statistical work but this quote caught my eye:
It would be quite odd for the author of a study to claim to find some kind of association if in fact the data was not statistically significant. At best they would say something like “we may be on to something here, but more research is needed…” So I looked up the abstract of the article http://ehpnet1.niehs.nih.gov/docs/1999/suppl-6/847-851kawachi/abstract.html and this is what Kawachi says, “Although the point estimates of risk for cardiovascular disease exceeded 1.0 in five of six studies, none of the relative risks was statistically significant because of the small number of cardiovascular end points occurring in individual studies.” Alas I don’t know what he means by point estimates and the full article is only available to members.
Nevertheless this is what I see as being the main point of the abstract:
In other words Kawachi (1) accepts the studies that claim an association between health risks such as heart disease and ETS in the home, (2) doesn’t feel that similar studies in the workplace have been conclusive, but (3) can see no biological reason why the risks wouldn’t be the same.
That’s an interesting story and reminds me of what Tris told us once about how similar statistical data is gathered in his field. If he drops in, he can give the details, but I recall the gist of it being that much of what is reported is not entirely reliable because either the questions and/or response selections are vague or amphibolous, or else the person filling out the forms is in a hurry or otherwise distracted.
** Edlyn ** - You need to understand that what you are presenting here is anecdotal, and even the best anecdotes don’t make good science. This is not nit picking. This is a very important point. No one is claiming – at least no one *should *be claiming – that ETS will always cause health problems. That’s not how medical science works. Even if the studies were absolutely conclusive, the best that you could say from them is that ETS *increases the risks * of certain diseases. “Increased risks” does not mean that everyone exposed to ETS will suffer from disease X, only that they are more likely to suffer from disease X that those not exposed to ETS.
You may know all that already since you qualified your remarks with “If that is true by your facts alone…” Still is is such a common misperception of the scientific method I thought I’d better not let it slide by.
I don’t think second-hand smoke is child abuse per se, but if it’s part of an overall “I don’t give a damn” attitude, it is. No one has the right to expose my child to a dangerous substance, not even me. Anyone callous enough to disregard our wishes WRT smoking is no longer welcome to spend time with Aaron.
Airman and I both smoke. (And, FTR, I did quit during pregnancy.) We do NOT smoke around Aaron; there is a perfectly good front porch outside where we can go if we want to smoke. We also don’t allow other people to smoke around him. If you want to smoke, fine, but you’re not doing it around my kid.
And here’s what we know about ETS, courtesy of Benton County, Oregon.
