Smoking and heart disease

Great Debates
1

Although not heart disease but still passive smoking related.

One of the UK’s better known stage performers is known, by those with greater knowledge than I, to have died from lung cancer bought about by passive smoking.

Roy Castle performed for many years in crowded clubs but he himself did not smoke.

He was diagnosed with lung cancer and recieved chemo, all very publically.

He campaigned for the remainder of his life against smoking and generated a lot of publicity using his own case as an example.

He set up a charity to help those who wished to give up smokining and it now includes organising conferances on smoking related diseases.

I guess he may not be known in the US but he was a genuinely nice guy in the dog eat dog world of showbiz and was much loved.

Take a look at the site - especially if you are trying to kick the habit.

2

Thank you for posting your comment.
Please include a link to Cecil’s column if it’s on the straight dope web site.
To include a link, it can be as simple as including the web page location in your post (make sure there is a space before and after the text of the URL).

Cecil’s column can be found on-line at this link:

Followup: Does second-hand smoke cause heart disease? (07-Jul-2000)

3

I hate to do this, but…

How do you know that his lung cancer was passive smoke related?

4

I beleive that the same thing happened to comedian Andy Kaufman (non-smoker dying of lung cancer), and I’ve read the same claim (that the lunch cancer was probably caused by the smoky comedy clubs that were his workplace.)

5

The anti-smoking health establishment has systematically suppressed research into the possible role of viruses in lung cancer since the 1950s. A certain extremely eminent cancer researcher named Dr. Howard Temin, a militant anti-smoker who made headlines at his Nobel ceremony when he asserted that stopping smoking is more important to cancer prevention than retroviruses, and who surely was as minimally exposed to secondhand smoke as it is possible to be, nevertheless died of lung cancer. It may yet turn out to that his ideology was most unfortunate from his own personal point of view, as well as that of others. He had worked with many viruses; perhaps, with poetic justice, one of them got him.

6

A growing body of evidence indicates that infection is the single largest risk factor for heart disease. And, when the largest risk factor has been left out, as it has been in all of the anti-smokers’ studies, then false risks for non-causal factors are generated.

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol4no4/campbell.htm

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JID/journal/contents/v181nS3.html

This is exactly what happened in the case of cervical cancer. They started out with simple studies which merely compared smokers’ versus nonsmokers’ risks, without considering human papillomavirus infection. As their technology improved, they began detecting HPV in a larger and proportion of cervical cancers. As this happened, the proportion blamed on smoking got smaller and smaller.

Now, it is considered that HPV causes 100% of cervical cancer. Those who continue to claim that smoking is a risk factor for cervical cancer, including the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute, are deliberately using defective studies which failed to detect HPV in a large percentage of the cases. They are misusing the false negatives to fraudulently blame smoking.

The anti-smokers can be expected to be very reluctant to admit the truth, because the claim that smoking causes cardiovascular disease is their single largest health claim against active smoking, plus it is the source of about 94% of supposed ETS deaths.

And PS, the tobacco lawyers have never challenged any anti-tobacco health claim on the basis of confounding by infection. They have behaved exactly as if they are secretly acting in collusion with the anti-smokers, and purposely throwing the fight.

7

Holding down the other end of the spectrum from Roy Castle is my grandmother, who as a lifelong Southern Baptist never smoked a single cigarette; who lived surrounded by other strict temperance advocates, none of whom smoked; who never worked in an office where anyone smoked; who certainly never performed in a smoke-filled nightclub; and who died about 10 years ago at age 91 of lung cancer. Is there somebody I can sue for this?

8

Carol Thompson says:

“The anti-smoking health establishment has systematically suppressed research into the possible role of viruses in lung cancer since the 1950s. A certain extremely eminent cancer researcher named Dr. Howard Temin, a militant anti-smoker who made headlines at his Nobel ceremony when he asserted that stopping smoking is more important to cancer prevention than retroviruses, and who surely was as minimally exposed to secondhand smoke as it is possible to be, nevertheless died of lung cancer. It may yet turn out to that his ideology was most unfortunate from his own personal point of view, as well as that of others. He had worked with many viruses; perhaps, with poetic justice, one of them got him.”

I say, let the punishment fit the crime. How is it poetic justice for someone to die of cancer for the crime of having possibly been mistaken (not proven) in his research?

This researcher probably came to the militant anti-smoking position from observation of statistics, which does not mean he is right or wrong, but does not mean he started out from that position and purposely found theories to support his already formed conclusion.

On the other hand, Carol Thompson is admittedly for smoker’s rights, and it would surprise me to see her posting anything that says second-hand smoke is bad for you.

Until we are sure about second-hand smoke, how about considering it to be guilty until proven innocent and not inflicting it on others?

9

I have never seen any claim that smoking is the sole cause of lung cancer.

Because a non-smoking person gets it, that does not invalidate the claim that lung cancer and smoking are related.

How can anyone trust the research that has been funded by tobacco companies which attempts to hide this link ?
So much research even by our esteemed highest most respected institutions has had funding from the tobacco industry so to quote a couple of websites is not good enough in this case.
Demonstrate to me their true independance, where did the funding come from and can you be sure that none of the participants do not have any other work funded by tobacco?
Big tobacco has been up to its tricks for decades and they have succesfully muddied the waters all that time, there is not a trick they have not tried and that includes straight lying before congressional hearings.

Even if you discount the research done by the over zealous there is evidence that there is a link between smoking and early death.

Does anyone seriously imagine the weighting that insurance companies have against smokers has no basis in reality ?
The actuaries make it their business to know such things and the shareholders would be dismayed if they did not.

There have been newspaper reports in the UK in the past week which comment on data that has been released into the public domain that strongly suggests a link between the reduction in UK male smoking habits since the 1960’s to now and the corresponding fall in lung cnacer and heart disease.It is significant enough to have increased male life expectancy .

Interestingly the same figures for women show an increase n smoking and a corresponding increase in smoking related deaths and illnesses which parallels the increase in their smoking.

BTW the single largest risk factor assciated with heart disease is genetic - it is known that heart disease runs in families.The important thing to note is that smoking is the greatest risk that is within the control of the individual.

As for lawyers acting solely with the collusion of non-smokers that is frankly laughable.Every major tobacco company has had teams of the finest legal brains that money can buy. Whilst you might question their integrity I seriously doubt that such well paid individuals are going to throw a case and cut off this lucrative work.You’ve got to be kidding.

So Carol come clean because you do not appear to have an independant voice.

Do you campaign for smokers rights ?
I bet you do.
You seem to be well versed in prepared and standardised debunking stories about those who have been effective in turnig the tide against smoking.

The legacy of Dr Temin will live longer than you or I for it will survive in those who gave up smoking and will live longer lives as a result.You seem almost glad that it was lung cancer that got him, that is most unworthy of you.

The body of work that follows him carried out by others, can you debunk that ?

Seriously doubt it.

You also fail to mention that smoking depresses the immune system and makes smokers more prone to chest infection so if virus is the cause of lung cancer it is hardly surprising that smokers get it and those who are weakened or elderly.

10

This is typical anti-smoker smearing. THERE IS NO SUCH SUPPOSED BODY OF TOBACCO COMPANY-FUNDED STUDIES TO SUPPOSEDLY DENY THAT SMOKING CAUSES LUNG AS THIS PERSON PRETENDS. It’s a lie created out of whole cloth, repeated by ignoramuses parroting other ignoramuses. Even those vaunted tobacco documents prove that the tobacco companies research only dithered away on trivia like constituent analyses and irrelevancies like mouse painting. This is despite the fact that NIH’s RJ Huebner told them repeatedly that they should be funding studies on the absolute causation of diseases. They ignored it. This is a classic example of how your vile and despicable anti-smoking movement runs on lie power, not truth.

The tobacco lawyers and the health establishment conspired together to merely put on act of the tobacco companies pretending to fight the anti-smokers by enlisting the so-called “Special Projects” clowns, such as Eysenck and his pop psychology, and TD Sterling and his parroting of the health establishment’s BS propaganda pretending that smokers get sick more often because they were naughty and didn’t eat their fruits and veggies like mommy told them.

That was the so-called “holding strategy” of supposedly trying to hold on to support, which was actually intended to let it slowly drift away from them, exactly as it did.

The bottom line is that anyone who can’t even refute the claim that smoking causes cervical cancer in the year 1999, as the tobacco lawyers failed to in the Florida case, has **** for brains. To **** with their vaunted “legal minds” – any lawyer who is worth a damn would at least acquaint himself with the scientific literature, which they did not!

Anyone who done so would at least be aware that it is now known that HPV causes 100% of cervical cancer, so there’s no room left for anything else to be an “independent” cause, and the anti-smokers’ own claims that passive smokers have similar risks prove that similar exposure to HPV by smokers and passive smokers is the true reason for this, because it’s not biologically plausible that exposure to a small amount of secondhand smoke is nearly equal to a large amount of firsthand plus secondhand smoke. Thus, there is no “synergistic” role for smoking, either.

Plus, how would they miss an article with the title, “Cigarette smoking as a cause of cervical cancer: Has confounding been controlled?” which explicitly demonstrates how the purported smoking risk arose by confounding? Only on purpose!

The bottom line is that the health establishment and the tobacco companies both conspired to make sure that no virus would be discovered which interacts with active smoking to increase the risk of cancer, and/or which causes passive smokers to be at a slightly higher risk of lung cancer, and which could possibly be eradicated to virtually eliminate lung cancer.

They want to eradicate tobacco, not cancer! See my new website,

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/CarolASThompson/

for more information.

11

And as for debunking Howard Temin’s “body of work”-- You are clearly as unfamiliar with this as you are with everything else of a factual nature. Temin’s work was irrelevant to the issue of whether smoking causes particular diseases. His fame is for the discovery of reverse transcriptase. He was one of those basic researchers whose work was often so esoteric that not even he himself knew whether it would have any practical application. And he worked largely with animal retroviruses that are not known to infect humans. My point being that perhaps if he had applied himself to the subject instead of dismissing it out of hand, maybe he could have saved his own butt.

12

And it’s another lie that the biggest risk factor for heart disease is genetic, on the supposed grounds that it “runs in families.” Infections run in families, too! C-reactive protein, which is a marker of inflammation that is not specific for any particular infection, regularly beats out everything else, including in the vaunted Nurses Study.

And it’s another lie that “smoking depresses the immune sytem” and causes more infections. It is an invention, not a discovery, to attempt to justify their anti-smoking claims. As I said earlier, the fact that the anti-smokers claim similar risks for passive smokers for numerous diseases, such as heart disease, that are disproportionate to the smoke exposure proves otherwise.

And, you are totally full of crap to accuse someone with views completely unlike either the tobacco companies or the anti-smoker lie-mongers of not being “independent.” Go take an enema and flush yourself!

13

Speaking as Administrator: Insults and ad hominem arguments should be taken to the forum called BBQ PIT, they have no place in this forum. This forum is intended for discussion and comment, not for slurs. This topic, especially, is one where it would be nice to drop the name-calling. Carol, you have now been warned. Please desist.

14

I take severe exception to being smeared thusly: “So Carol come clean because you do not appear to have an independent voice.”

This is an ad hominem.

I demand that THIS AD HOMINEM BE REPRIMANDED.

I’m sick and tired of the double standard where anti-smokers are allowed to lie and smear and insult with impunity. And if anyone objects, they are treated as the bad guys.

15

The problem is you weren’t objecting, in this thread you seem to be the main offender.

If you want to discuss this matter in this forum rather than the pit, you are going to have to cool down a tad and rely on rather than demand that the moderators keep others in line if required.

Please don’t get upset, carry on. Indeed, at least in this forum more people will pay attention if you post more in light than heat.

picmr

16

No, the problem is twisted anti-smoker definitions that mean the opposite what they’re supposed to mean. Their intention is to create a hostile environment in order to obstruct free discusssion, via double standard which permit anti-smokers to smear and abuse with impunity, while nitpicking at and threatening smokers.

The bottom line fact is that the anti-smokers make blanket statements about the supposed wrongdoing of anyone on the other side, without bothering to submit any facts to back them up. And that in the opinion of the prejudiced is more acceptable than dissenters presenting supporting facts and discussing the issues.

Furthermore, they refuse to be specific even about what they are claiming to be ad hominem. They don’t seem to know the definition of “ad hominem.” It really means, the specious argument that someone is immoral, therefore their views are immoral. The anti-smokers use it all the time! It does not, as the anti-smokers like to pretend, mean simply telling someone off.

Let’s get Cecil in on the definition of “ad hominem!” I think he would enjoy this.

17

I see some unpleasantness in this thread. I would like to urge everyone to take a few deep breaths and please remember that in this forum we expect people to remain cool, calm and collected.

My personal opinion[ul][li]If you feel someone has insulted you, that is no reason to turn around and reciprocate. If you feel you must respond to that poster in stronger terms, we have another forum for that purpose, The BBQ Pit. Please be warned that The BBQ Pit is not a smoke-free region, so visit it at your peril![/li][li]Cecil Adams rarely posts on this board. I doubt he would be interested in intervening in a personal dispute between some of the posters. That is why he hires us lesser souls (administrators and moderators) to oversee the action here with the well-known iron fist in the velvet glove.[/li][li]Now I want everyone in here to shake hands and apologize to each other. Otherwise you’ll be sent to the blackboard to write 100 times “I promise to be nice in the ‘Comments on Cecil’s Columns’ forum.”[/li][/ul]

18

Spider woman said: “Until we are sure about second-hand smoke, how about considering it guilty until proven otherwise?”

This is no more legitimate a reason for depriving people of their liberty with smoking bans than for throwing them in jail. As far as proving otherwise goes, for starters those who are pretending to evaluate the scientific evidence while actually attempting to prove that it is dangerous ought to refrain from dishonest examinations of the issue which ignore the role of infections.

PS, did you know that not even the author of the EPA ETS report chapters on asthma, Dr. Fernando Martinez of the University of Arizona, believes in the garbage he wrote anymore? Quote: “Like most people, I assumed tobacco smoke and pollution were the problem - this was the politically correct way to think. But these turned out not to play a major role.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/cgi-bin/o/issues/2000/05/shell.htm

Considering how much the public has been beaten over the head with that EPA ETS report, surely the media ought to consider this statement sensational, instead of ignoring it. Think of all the laws that have been passed on the basis of beliefs that couldn’t even hold firmly in the minds of their scientific advocates for even a decade.

19

While it is probably true that second-hand smoke has not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be a carcinogen, it does annoy many people. So whether or not it causes cancer, many people would prefer not to be around it. This is why we have the non-smoking sections of restaurants. That is enough of a distance for me, so that smokers can enjoy themselves and so can I.

I think also that almost anything could be a carcinogen, depending on different tolerances and exposure levels. I have read (Carol, you are maybe more up on this than I am) that cancer viruses are present in all humans, and each human has a different tolerance for them; some people’s immune systems fight them better than others. I have also heard that carcinogens play an interactive role with genetic predispostion toward cancer, and exposure level.

My mother, who was a small woman and a pack a day smoker since the age of fourteen, died of lung cancer at the age of 59. I have heard of other people who smoked heavily and lived to a ripe old age. Cancer is present in some of my mother’s siblings who never smoked, but not lung cancer. Not that this conclusively prooves anything; just some anecdotal facts.

20

Chemical carcinogenicity has been hyped up as much as secondhand smoke. It assuredly helps the anti-smoking cause as well as the environmental cause if people believe they are in constant peril from chemicals and pollution. Advocates such as Samuel Epstein have striven for decades to make people believe that, apart from tobacco, the vast majority of cancer is caused by exposure to man-made chemicals.

This view is now in discredit, but this hasn’t been well-disseminated to much of the public. Some of its former advocates has repudiated it, particularly Bruce Ames (“Too many rodent carcinogens,” etc.) The rodent tests used to proclaim substances carcinogenic are not realistic. The substances chosen for testing were heavily biased toward man-made chemicals, when natural chemicals were actually just as likely to be found “carcinogenic” by those methods, plus natural chemicals make up a far higher proportion of exposure (99.9% of the carcinogenic potential of ordinary food, for example).

So, exposures to chemicals and pollution are not thought to account for more than 5% of cancer. In comparison, 15% of cancers are now known to have an infectious etiology, and another 15% are suspected.

And that “30%” proportion claimed for tobacco is about half accounted for by falsely blaming smoking for cancers that are really caused by infection (e.g., Helicobacter pylori, HPV, hepatitis, etc.). The anti-smokers are still using their 20-year-old Doll & Peto junk for propaganda, and refusing to update it. Now, wouldn’t it be nice to take the anti-smokers to court and force them to live by the rules that they demand the tobacco companies live by – especially since the anti-smokers pretend to be “voice of science.”