People in the CDC Quit Smoking Ads

Factual Questions
1

This might get derailed, and I personally don’t mind thread drift, but that means the mods may move it; however, I think that what I have right now is genuinely a factual question.

It’s about those CDC quit smoking ads. They have a guy right now who takes out his teeth, and says he lost them to some kind of disease from smoking, and a women who says her baby was two months premature because she smoked while she was pregnant.

They’ve had a guy who had his legs amputated, and a couple of people with laryngeal cancer.

Now, I know that all these things have statistically high associations with smoking (actually, I wasn’t aware that smoking caused premature birth; I thought it caused small-for-term babies-- babies that were delivered at term, but were sometimes the size of preemies). The CDC website has a bio for Amanda, but offers no real direct line from smoking to prematurity (it seems her daughter does have ongoing health problems, and she herself blames it on smoking). It could well be a post hoc error.

Anyway, what sort of verification is there that the people we are seeing were actually harmed by smoking? I realize that laryngeal cancer is very rare in non-smokers, and so the evidence may be pretty good that a lot of these people wouldn’t have had their problems if they hadn’t smoked, but the woman with the premature baby really troubles me, because lots of non-smokers have premature babies.

I’m a non-smoker who is very happy when something discourages people from smoking-- short of lying. Lying backfires. You show people lots of lung cancer victims who smoked, and that’s pretty fair, because the evidence that smoking causes lung cancer is indisputable, and anyone who goes and looks it up is going to have the information confirmed.

However, someone who looks up prematurity and maternal smoking is going to find a lot of variables. I’d hate for someone to check up on that particular story, decide it’s BS, and therefore the entire 1-800-QUIT-NOW campaign is bogus, and further, that all anti-smoking info is bogus.

Does anyone know how the ad campaign finds the people it uses, and how it verifies their stories?

2

Without having researched these particular commercials (I have seen a few), I still feel fairly comfortable saying that these are ‘dramatizations of actual patient experiences’, done by actors.

Epidemiologically we can be quite certain that there have been a significant number of patients who have had these experiences. We don’t need to know specific cases to know that’s true.

So why bother proving a case, hiring the patient, getting the proper waivers signed, when one can go the route I’ve described.

I don’t consider this approach bogus; it portrays real and genuine consequences of that particular behavior.

3

Well, I really think he is an automatic dishwasher. What a comedown from Sheriff of Eureka

4

If you look at the website, you’ll see they’re not.

5

The CDC says on their website that smoking can cause premature birth as well as low birthweight and other problems. In fact, it even says it on the page you linked.

Are you doubting that?

6

No. I just said it was news to me. New to me. But I wonder how they verified that there was a direct causal link in that particular woman’s case. It’s not like Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, where a child cannot have FAS unless the mother drank while pregnant.

Like I said, I’m a non-smoker who really dislikes being around smoke, so I’m in favor of anything that reduces smoking, or keeps people from starting, but prevarication, I think, is counter-productive; I guess something in my brain sees these commercials and says “cite?”

7

If its on TV, it has to be true. That goes double for the Internets.

8

First off your right about the CDC ads being paid actors. About 8 months ago CDC placed an contract with an ad agency to get people with a list of health issues for the ads. They were paid 2500 bucks each if they were used. The problem they paced on the supposd actors was they had to provide an affidavit from a doctor stating their condition is due to smoking. You might go why would that be! Its simple CDC nor anyone else has conclusive end point proof of any and I MEAN ANY supposed tobacco caused disease including LUNG CANCER!

Your other questions I will answer separately and please don’t laugh to hard.

9

In more rational times, before the anti-tobacco hysteria began in earnest, women who smoked continued to smoke and enjoy other normal pleasures of life without guilt during their pregnancies. Many even smoked during labor to help them relax and take the edge off their pain. If their doctors mentioned smoking at all, it would be to advise them to perhaps cut down if they were heavy smokers, something which most did intuitively because they didn’t “feel” like smoking as much.
But pity the poor Bolton smoker today who becomes pregnant, because she will be told that if she continues to smoke at all (or have any alcohol or caffeine) during her pregnancy, she is putting her developing fetus at high risk of death or disability.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Though there is considerable evidence showing that on average the babies of women who smoke during pregnancy weigh on average a few ounces less than babies of women who do not smoke and that the rate of low birthweight babies is somewhat higher for smokers, there is no credible evidence for the hyperbolic claims that the babies of smokers have a higher mobidity and mortality rate. Quite the contrary, the babies of women who smoke during pregnancy have a better survival rate ounce for ounce, a somewhat lower rate of congenital defects, a lower rate of Down’s syndrome, a lower rate of infant respiratory distress syndrome and a somewhat lower rate of childhood cancer than do the babies of non-smokers.

Dr. Richard L. Naeye, a leading obstetrical researcher who studied more than 58,000 pregnancies, states unequivocally:

“We recently found no significant association between maternal smoking and either stillbirths or neonatal deaths when information about the underlying disorders, obtained from placental examinations, was incorporated into the analyses. Similar analyses found no correlation between maternal smoking and preterm birth. The most frequent initiating causes of preterm birth, stillbirth, and neonatal death are acute chorioamnionitis, disorders that produce chronic low blood flow from the uterus to the placenta, and major congenital malformations. There is no credible evidence that cigarette smoking has a role in the genesis of any of these disorders.”

10

The myth of smoking during pregnancy being harmful

Wed, 30 Oct 2013 17:51 CDT

In about 1999 I was asked to analyze the data of pregnant women with respect to smoking for a major health insurance company. They were running a campaign to get pregnant women to stop smoking and they expected to find interesting data to support their case.

I used to teach college courses covering the topic. The text books said that smoking causes underweight premature babies. Because of this babies of smoking mothers are more likely to have birth defects. With alcohol, two drinks a day was considered safe, but with tobacco, there was no safe threshold. I thought this was rather strange. You smoke one cigarette while pregnant and you are more likely to have birth defects? Even for a hard core health fanatic that is difficult to believe.

Here is what was found in the data. Babies of smoking mothers average weight was 3232 grams (7.1 lbs.). Babies of non-smoking mothers averaged 3398 grams (7.5 lbs.). That is about a half pound difference and it is statistically significant. Seven pounds is a good healthy birth weight that does not set off any alarms. Babies are considered underweight if they are less than 2270 grams (5 lbs.). 4.5% of smoking mothers babies were underweight and 3.3% of non-smoking mothers babies were underweight. This difference is not significant. There is no indication here of a health risk from smoking based on weight.

The other risk factor is length of term. Normal gestation is 253 days. 4% of smoking mothers did not go to term and 7.8% of non-smoking mothers did not go to term. Smoking mothers did better than non-smoking mothers but the difference was not significant. There was obviously no risk from reduced term for smoking mothers.

Because the non-smoking mothers had heavier babies one would expect more C-Sections from the non-smoking mothers. There were about 20% more. This is significant at the .05 level but not the .01 level so you could argue the significance either way depending on your bias. The data here is limited because only 5% of pregnant women smoked but the trend for smoking mothers was toward less babies retained in the hospital, less C-Sections, insignificantly fewer pre-term deliveries and an insignificant increase in clinically underweight babies.

This data can be explained by assuming that when pregnant women are stressed, they self medicate to relieve the stress. Non-smoking women tend to eat more causing the baby to be larger and more difficult to deliver. This can also cause other problems. Smoking women tend to light up when under stress. This is less harmful to the baby than over-eating. For this reason smoking mothers tended to have better outcomes for baby and mother. They also cost less for the insurance company.

You might be interested in knowing that this information was not used. I was told that the medical insurance business is highly regulated by the government. The company was not allowed to tell the truth about these results even though it was better for the insurance company and for the patients.

I do not think these results suggest that women should start smoking when they get pregnant. I do think it indicates that it is very poor practice to try to get smoking mothers to stop smoking when they get pregnant.
About me

I have a Ph.D. in experimental psychology and have worked in both research and teaching. I am a health nut and do not endorse smoking or care to be around people smoking. I was shocked by these results. My bias if any is certainly against these results. However I think it is horrible to withhold information form people and intentionally give them bad advice to advance a political agenda.

11

JOINT STATEMENT ON THE RE-ASSESSMENT OF THE TOXICOLOGICAL TESTING OF TOBACCO PRODUCTS"
7 October, the COT meeting on 26 October and the COC meeting on 18
November 2004.
http://cot.food.gov.uk/pdfs/cotstatementtobacco0409
“5. The Committees commented that tobacco smoke was a highly complex chemical mixture and that the causative agents for smoke induced diseases (such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, effects on reproduction and on offspring) was unknown. The mechanisms by which tobacco induced adverse effects were not established. The best information related to tobacco smoke - induced lung cancer, but even in this instance a detailed mechanism was not available. The Committees therefore agreed that on the basis of current knowledge it would be very difficult to identify a toxicological testing strategy or a biomonitoring approach for use in volunteer studies with smokers where the end-points determined or biomarkers measured were predictive of the overall burden of tobacco-induced adverse disease.”

In other words … our first hand smoke theory is so lame we can’t even design a bogus lab experiment to prove it. In fact … we don’t even know how tobacco does all of the magical things we claim it does.

The greatest threat to the second hand theory is the weakness of the first hand theory.

12

Judge doesnt accept statistical studies as proof of LC causation!

It was McTear V Imperial Tobacco. Here is the URL for both my summary and the Judge’s ‘opinion’ (aka ‘decision’):

(2.14) Prof Sir Richard Doll, Mr Gareth Davies (CEO of ITL). Prof James Friend and
Prof Gerad Hastings gave oral evidence at a meeting of the Health Committee in
2000. This event was brought up during the present action as putative evidence that
ITL had admitted that smoking caused various diseases. Although this section is quite
long and detailed, I think that we can miss it out. Essentially, for various reasons, Doll
said that ITL admitted it, but Davies said that ITL had only agreed that smoking might
cause diseases, but ITL did not know. ITL did not contest the public health messages.
(2.62) ITL then had the chance to tell the Judge about what it did when the suspicion
arose of a connection between lung cancer and smoking. Researchers had attempted
to cause lung cancer in animals from tobacco smoke, without success. It was right,
therefore, for ITL to ‘withhold judgement’ as to whether or not tobacco smoke caused
lung cancer.

[9.10] In any event, the pursuer has failed to prove individual causation.
Epidemiology cannot be used to establish causation in any individual case, and the
use of statistics applicable to the general population to determine the likelihood of
causation in an individual is fallacious. Given that there are possible causes of lung
cancer other than cigarette smoking, and given that lung cancer can occur in a nonsmoker,
it is not possible to determine in any individual case whether but for an
individual’s cigarette smoking he probably would not have contracted lung cancer
(paras.[6.172] to [6.185]).
[9.11] In any event there was no lack of reasonable care on the part of ITL at any
point at which Mr McTear consumed their products, and the pursuer’s negligence
case fails. There is no breach of a duty of care on the part of a manufacturer, if a
consumer of the manufacturer’s product is harmed by the product, but the consumer
knew of the product’s potential for causing harm prior to consumption of it. The
individual is well enough served if he is given such information as a normally
intelligent person would include in his assessment of how he wishes to conduct his
life, thus putting him in the position of making an informed choice (paras.[7.167] to
[7.181]).

13

:confused: so smoking during pregnancy is actually good for your baby? Maybe I should start, then…

14

Not 1 Death or Sickness Etiologically Assigned to Tobacco. All the diseases attributed to smoking are also present in non smokers. It means, in other words, that they are multifactorial, that is, the result of the interaction of tens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of factors, either known or suspected contributors - of which smoking can be one.

Here’s my all-time favorite “scientific” study of the the anti-smoking campaign: “Lies, Damned Lies, & 400,000 Smoking-Related Deaths,” Robert A. Levy and Rosalind B. Marimont, Journal of Regulation, Vol. 21 (4), 1998.

You can access the article for free on the Cato Institute’s wesbite, Cato.org. This article neither defends nor promotes smoking. Rather it condemns the abuse of statistics to misinform and scare the public. Levy, by the way taught Statistics for Lawyers at Georgetown University Law School. There is also a popular law school class called How to Lie With Statistics.

Manufacturing the science to meet the agenda, in black on white. Does anyone still have doubts?

''Bal laughs when asked about the role of scientific evidence in guiding policy decisions. “There was no science on how to do a community intervention on something of this global dimension,” he says. “Where there is no science, you have to go and be venturesome—you can’t use the paucity of science as an excuse to do nothing. We created the science, we did the interventions and then all the scientists came in behind us and analyzed what we did.”

Read under the title :
Tobacco Control: The Long War—When the Evidence Has to Be Created

15

That would be an individual choise. But because there has been a concerted effort for well over 100 years to demonize tobacco itself from Prohibitionists The subject is full of Junk science claims by the anti-smoking crowd. You see they’ve spent Billions of wasted dollars trying to prove smoking causes just one thing in anyone or anything but failed miserably.

From about 1875 onward statistical manipulation has been the tool of social engineers/prohibitionists against tobacco/alcohol/drugs/sugar/obesity/soda pop/junk food you name it.

Todays no different and I can go into about every claim they’ve made and debunk it or people I know who can and have debunked the claims.

But with smoking and pregnancy we’ve got all the proof we need that its harmless BABYBOOMERS the longest lived generation ever and born to smoking moms the world over!

16

The 1875 claim is backed here when Mark Twain felt forced to write the MORAL STATISTICIAN. First published in 1894

Mark Twain said it right over a hundred years ago:

“The Moral Statistician.”
Originally published in Sketches, Old and New, 1893

"I don’t want any of your statistics; I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it.

I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man’s health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years’ indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of wine at dinner, etc. etc. And you are always figuring out how many women have been burned to death because of the dangerous fashion of wearing expansive hoops, etc. etc. You never see more than one side of the question.

You are blind to the fact that most old men in America smoke and drink coffee, although, according to your theory, they ought to have died young; and that hearty old Englishmen drink wine and survive it, and portly old Dutchmen both drink and smoke freely, and yet grow older and fatter all the time. And you never try to find out how much solid comfort, relaxation, and enjoyment a man derives from smoking in the course of a lifetime (which is worth ten times the money he would save by letting it alone), nor the appalling aggregate of happiness lost in a lifetime by your kind of people from not smoking. Of course you can save money by denying yourself all those little vicious enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do with it? What use can you put it to? Money can’t save your infinitesimal soul. All the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life; therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment where is the use of accumulating cash?

It won’t do for you to say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing a good table, and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and hungry. And you never dare to laugh in the daytime for fear some poor wretch, seeing you in a good humor, will try to borrow a dollar of you; and in church you are always down on your knees, with your ears buried in the cushion, when the contribution-box comes around; and you never give the revenue officers a full statement of your income.

Now you know all these things yourself, don’t you? Very well, then, what is the use of your stringing out your miserable lives to a lean and withered old age? What is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless to you? In a word, why don’t you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into becoming as ornery and unlovable as you are yourselves, by your villainous “moral statistics”?"

Also, Benjamin Franklin said,
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

17

Heres the actual Chemical composition of second hand smoke
About 90% of secondary smoke is composed of water vapor and ordinary air with a minor amount of carbon dioxide. The volume of water vapor of second hand smoke becomes even larger as it quickly disperses into the air,depending upon the humidity factors within a set location indoors or outdoors. Exhaled smoke from a smoker will provide 20% more water vapor to the smoke as it exists the smokers mouth.

4 % is carbon monoxide.

6 % is those supposed 4,000 chemicals to be found in tobacco smoke. Unfortunatley for the smoke free advocates these supposed chemicals are more theorized than actually found.What is found is so small to even call them threats to humans is beyond belief.Nanograms,picograms and femptograms…
(1989 Report of the Surgeon General p. 80).

18

Then when we look up the reference for scientific data it gets even more Insane against the anti-smoking advocates claims of harm.
Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence: Third Edition

nap.edu

This sorta says it all

These limits generally are based on assessments of health risk and calculations of concentrations that are associated with what the regulators believe to be negligibly small risks. The calculations are made after first identifying the total dose of a chemical that is safe (poses a negligible risk) and then determining the concentration of that chemical in the medium of concern that should not be exceeded if exposed individuals (typically those at the high end of media contact) are not to incur a dose greater than the safe one.

So OSHA standards are what is the guideline for what is acceptable ‘‘SAFE LEVELS’’

OSHA SAFE LEVELS

All this is in a small sealed room 9x20 and must occur in ONE HOUR.

For Benzo[a]pyrene, 222,000 cigarettes.

"For Acetone, 118,000 cigarettes.

"Toluene would require 50,000 packs of simultaneously smoldering cigarettes.

Acetaldehyde or Hydrazine, more than 14,000 smokers would need to light up.

"For Hydroquinone, “only” 1250 cigarettes.

For arsenic 2 million 500,000 smokers at one time.

The same number of cigarettes required for the other so called chemicals in shs/ets will have the same outcomes.

So, OSHA finally makes a statement on shs/ets :

Field studies of environmental tobacco smoke indicate that under normal conditions, the components in tobacco smoke are diluted below existing Permissible Exposure Levels (PELS.) as referenced in the Air Contaminant Standard (29 CFR 1910.1000)…It would be very rare to find a workplace with so much smoking that any individual PEL would be exceeded." -Letter From Greg Watchman, Acting Sec’y, OSHA.

Why are their any smoking bans at all they have absolutely no validity to the courts or to science!

19

This study pretty well ended the SHS Scare altogether
This pretty well destroys the Myth of second hand smoke:

Lungs from pack-a-day smokers safe for transplant, study finds.

By JoNel Aleccia, Staff Writer, NBC News.

Using lung transplants from heavy smokers may sound like a cruel joke, but a new study finds that organs taken from people who puffed a pack a day for more than 20 years are likely safe.

What’s more, the analysis of lung transplant data from the U.S. between 2005 and 2011 confirms what transplant experts say they already know: For some patients on a crowded organ waiting list, lungs from smokers are better than none.

“I think people are grateful just to have a shot at getting lungs,” said Dr. Sharven Taghavi, a cardiovascular surgical resident at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, who led the new study…

Ive done the math here and this is how it works out with second ahnd smoke and people inhaling it!

The 16 cities study conducted by the U.S. DEPT OF ENERGY and later by Oakridge National laboratories discovered:

Cigarette smoke, bartenders annual exposure to smoke rises, at most, to the equivalent of 6 cigarettes/year.

146,000 CIGARETTES SMOKED IN 20 YEARS AT 1 PACK A DAY.

A bartender would have to work in second hand smoke for 2433 years to get an equivalent dose.

Then the average non-smoker in a ventilated restaurant for an hour would have to go back and forth each day for 119,000 years to get an equivalent 20 years of smoking a pack a day! Pretty well impossible ehh!

20

OK; just FTR, I do not doubt that there are links between a number of diseases and smoking. There certainly are statistical links. Practically no one who has not smoked gets primary lung cancer (and the ones who do are miners, worked with asbestos, or lived with a heavy smoker for decades, something like that). Ditto for laryngeal cancer. The stats are overwhelming. The ones for preemies are less convincing. The odds for having a preemie if you smoke increase by about 25%, but that’s over your individual risk. Some women who don’t smoke have a high individual risk, while others have a low individual risk (quitting while pregnant is still a really good idea, even if you white-knuckle it, and start again after the baby is born). It’s my understanding that “small for gestational age” is a risk more highly associated with smoking than with individual variables.

But really, what I’m getting at, is that statistical probability is not the same thing as direct causation in an individual case.

It’s like determining HIV transmission. Woman-to-woman transmission is statistically unlikely; man-to-woman is more likely, so back in the early days or trying to trace contacts to determine when people had been infected in order to determine life expectancy, women who were lesbians, but had ever had one heterosexual encounter, were told they had probably gotten it that way. It was usually bad news, because that was often much longer ago than their other contacts. However, if there was a confirmed case of HIV among a woman’s female past partners, it became much more likely that this was a case of WtW transmission.

So in order to evaluate a case like the smoker with the premature baby, we don’t know what all her variables are, and there are a lot in determining risk for prematurity.