What a sham and waste of resources. I'd like to see where Dr. Marty Fenstersheib got those numbers from. The real campaign should revolve around childhood obesity. People within the last 20 years have grown morbidly obese and continue to put a strain on healthcare system.
Walk by Starbucks and you'll see some smokers and you might catch a whiff of minimal toxins before you pass them by. Now walk into McDonald's and see how many morbidly obese children are eating their Big Macs and see where the real problems are.

Where do those numbers come from? The whole "second-hand smoke" issue is bogus. BP murdered the Gulf Of Mexico and put Corexit into our food chain, TEPCO has us all soaking in radioisotopes, PG&E blew up a neighborhood in San Bruno, and I can't light a cigarette in a bar.

This fixation with cigarette smoking is ridiculous. It's time it stopped. One in five adult Americans smoke cigarettes. There has been absolutely no decline in respiratory ailments since this nonsense started back in 1985.

Those wondering "where those numbers come from" should get off their behinds and spend more time learning and less time bloviating. DHHS has a fine site, and the CDC has many entries on secondhand smoke science.

If this was true, then I should of been dead a long time ago, as well as a lot of people I know. Both my parents smoked like chimneys inside the car, apartment and house. I'm 48 and I'm just fine. the problem with these statistics is that they can be manipulated to reflex whatever the person doing it wants.

Here is a site that has real facts.

Web Link

Jeanne Calment, who was listed as the world's oldest human whose birth date could be certified, died at 122. She had begun smoking as a young woman. At 117 she quit smoking (by that age she was just smoking two or three cigarettes per day because she was blind and was too proud to ask often for someone to light her cigarettes for her). But she resumed smoking when she was 118 because, as she said, not smoking made her miserable and she was too old to be made miserable. She also said to her doctor: "Once you've lived as long as me, only then can you tell me not to smoke." Good point! [USA Today, "Way to go, champ," 10/18/95].

When Mme. Calment died at 122 in l997, the new longevity champ became 116-year-old Marie-Louise Meilleur, of Canada. Mme. Meilleur had chain-smoked all her adult life (as her grandson said, "She always had a cigarette dangling from her lips as she worked,"--AP, 8/15/97, reported in Miami Herald, p. 2A). She did give up smoking, however, when she was nearly 100.


Dr. Cybersteinb

The CDC and DHHS are not in any way reliable sources of information. This entire "second-hand smoke" fraud has been perpetrated by focusing on one factor only in determining the cause of death in cardiopulmonary fatalities: whether the deceased lived with a smoker. Not one of these "studies" examined exposure to other environmental factors, diet, or lifestyle choices unrelated to smoking. The absence of any decline in respiratory illnesses since this charade began in 1985 clearly indicates that ambient cigarette smoke is not the problem.

Big Pharma wants a lock on nicotine delivery systems. It's that simple.

I agree with those that say this is a waste of time and there is absolutely no way they can prove it beyond any doubts. I say there are more pollutants in the air causing more health issues than second hand smoke. I get tired of their scare tactics and mis-information.

gene:

Why don't you just give us the referenced government pages that show how these numbers were derived?

"smokedrift" said:

"Gene: Why don't you just give us the referenced government pages that show how these numbers were derived?"

No problem, lazybones. Here you go:

Surgeon General: Web Link

CDC: Web Link

National Institutes of Health: Web Link

PubMed: Web Link

Other sites with plentiful, authoritative info on SHS:

* The World Health Organization
* The U.S. National Cancer Institute
* The United States Environmental Protection Agency
* The California Environmental Protection Agency
* The American Heart Association, American Lung Association, and American Cancer Society
* The American Medical Association
* The American Academy of Pediatrics
* The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council
* The United Kingdom Scientific Committee on Tobacco and Health

But then, I have the feeling that someone like you will flat-out reject all information that doesn't fit his agenda anyway. Am I right?

"old ben" sez,

"This entire "second-hand smoke" fraud has been perpetrated by focusing on one factor only in determining the cause of death in cardiopulmonary fatalities: whether the deceased lived with a smoker. Not one of these "studies" examined exposure to other environmental factors, diet, or lifestyle choices unrelated to smoking."

Utter ignoramus nonsense. Quit copy/pasting out of screwball pro-smoking websites.

As neatly summed up by a Federal Judge after a 6-year lawsuit:

"Evidence of the health risks of passive smoking is derived from many sources. It comes from knowledge of the health risks of active smoking, the carcinogenicity and toxicity of the components in mainstream and sidestream smoke, the evidence that nonsmokers absorb the disease-causing components of tobacco smoke, and epidemiological studies that have assessed the association of passive exposure to tobacco smoke with disease outcomes."