Misplaced Pages

Talk:Passive smoking

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Speccy4Eyes (talk | contribs) at 06:28, 25 August 2015 (→Requested move 16 August 2015: oppose). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 06:28, 25 August 2015 by Speccy4Eyes (talk | contribs) (→Requested move 16 August 2015: oppose)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Passive smoking article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.
Article policies
Find medical sources: Source guidelines · PubMed · Cochrane · DOAJ · Gale · OpenMD · ScienceDirect · Springer · Trip · Wiley · TWL
Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5Auto-archiving period: 35 days 
This page is not a forum for general discussion about the risks of second-hand smoke. Any such comments may be removed or refactored. Please limit discussion to improvement of this article. You may wish to ask factual questions about the risks of second-hand smoke at the Reference desk.
This page is not a forum for general discussion about Passive smoking. Any such comments may be removed or refactored. Please limit discussion to improvement of this article. You may wish to ask factual questions about Passive smoking at the Reference desk.
This article has not yet been rated on Misplaced Pages's content assessment scale.
It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:
Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details.
WikiProject iconMedicine High‑importance
WikiProject iconThis article is within the scope of WikiProject Medicine, which recommends that medicine-related articles follow the Manual of Style for medicine-related articles and that biomedical information in any article use high-quality medical sources. Please visit the project page for details or ask questions at Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Medicine.MedicineWikipedia:WikiProject MedicineTemplate:WikiProject Medicinemedicine
HighThis article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.
Archiving icon
Archives
Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3
Archive 4Archive 5

This page has archives. Sections older than 35 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III.

Enstrom and Kabat POV and bad sources

It says:-

Notably, the study had failed to identify a comparison group of "unexposed" persons.

Source 117 has a some warped logic.

1. You cannot generate an RR without a comparison group.

2. The author of this source claims there is no comparison group because smoking was allowed in public places at the time so therefore everyone was exposed to ETS, i.e. impossible to find someone not exposed. The guy is crazy, the control group is good. Even if the groups are slightly redefined as this guy suggests; one group is exposed to ETS at home and outside the home, the control group is just exposed to ETS outside the home from time to time.

3. We have to remember that the American Cancer Society commissioned this report and only withdrew funding when they realized they were not going to get the results they wanted.

4. Published in the British Medical Journal which provoked a barrage of condemnation in which the then BMJ editor Dr Richard Smith was accused of every failing from naivety to active promotion of evil. His accusers demanded that he withdraw the article. To his credit, Smith refused, pointing out that the BMJ exists to publish science not polemic, and that the American study was proper, peer-reviewed science. A robust and persuasive anti-smoker, he replied that although the BMJ was "passionately anti-tobacco" it was not "anti-science". He went on to explain that "the question has not been definitively answered." "I found it disturbing that so many people and organisations referred to the flaws in the study without specifying what they were. Indeed, this debate was much more remarkable for its passion than its precision."

Source 118 - Is a letter asking for funding in a study in low levels of active smoking no doubt because Enstrom believed as the European study (Bjerregaard, Raaschou-Nielsen, Sørensen et al 2006 - see Richard Doll and Occasional smoking below) found that there was no relationship between occasional smoking and lung cancer.

Source 119 - Has the subtitle "Did the tobacco industry skew results of survey?" probably not! since the results are consistent with the WHO study on passive smoking. "Criminal racketeering" please.

The other sources are irrelevant Enstrom admits that after the ACS pulled out the tobacco industry funded the end of the report.

What is notable is that no-one has pointed out specific problems with the research and the findings are consistent with other studies.

The WHO study (Boffetta 98) found:-

Social study Male & Female RR = 1.03

Effect on children RR = 0.78 (note that they found ETS beneficial to children)

Workplace RR = 1.17

Spousal RR = 1.16

(NONE OF THESE ARE SIGNIFICANT ASSOCIATIONS, RR is less than 2. For the positive effect in chrildren to be significant it should be under 0.5).

Enstrom and Kabat

Lung Cancer Men RR = 0.75

Lung Cancer Women RR = 0.99

(NO SIGNIFICANT ASSOCIATIONS)

This is all consistent.

Here is a list of 57 partner studies (one partner smoked, the other didn't) from International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) http://monographs.iarc.fr/ENG/Monographs/vol83/mono83-7B.pdf

RR's over 3 = 0

RR's 2.5 or higher = 2

RR's over 2 = 7

RR's under 1 = 8

RR's 0.5 and under = 2 (i.e. passive smoking is beneficial)

RR's marked NR = 12 (i.e. RR was not reported)

With RR's like this any epidemiologist worth his salt will see this as inconclusive. That is an average of 1.39 of the 45 studies not marked NR.

Occasional smoking and Richard Doll

I suggest both of these are important to this subject.

Sir Richard Doll's "British Doctors Study" the study that proved the increased risk of lung cancer, concludes that "on average those who smoke until age 30 have no excess mortality, those who smoke until age 40 lose 1 year, those who smoke until 50 lose 4 years, and those who smoke until age 60 lose 7 years". http://en.wikipedia.org/British_Doctors_Study http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC437139/ http://www.who.int/docstore/bulletin/pdf/issue1/smokingand.pdf?ua=1

On Desert Island Discs in 2001, Sir Richard Doll, the man who proved the incontrovertible causal link between active smoking and lung cancer, said: "The effect of other people smoking in my presence is so small it doesn't worry me."

The risk of lung cancer according to Doll's groundbreaking study 1950, table 14.

No smoking- 50 in 1 million = 0.00005% (1 non smoker in 20000)

1 to 4 cigarettes per day- 307 in 1 million = 0.000307% (1 light smoker in 3257)

50+ cigarettes per day- 3344 in 1 million = 0.003344% (1 heavy smoker in 300)

IF YOU CONSIDER THESE FIGURES, THE ACTUAL CHANCES OF LUNG CANCER ARE SMALL!

In a pan European study the effects of occasional smoking were studied with no significant results

The effect of occasional smoking on smoking-related cancers

Bjerregaard BK, Raaschou-Nielsen O, Sørensen M, Frederiksen K, Tjønneland A, Rohrmann S, Linseisen J, Bergman MM, Boeing H, Sieri S, Palli D, Tumino R, Sacerdote C, Bueno-de-Mesquita HB, Büchner FL, Gram IT, Braaten T, Lund E, Hallmans G, Agren A, Riboli E (December 2006). "The effect of occasional smoking on smoking-related cancers: in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC)". Cancer Causes Control 17 (10): 1305–9

http://en.wikipedia.org/Health_effects_of_tobacco "A 2006 European study on occasional smoking published findings that the risk of the major smoking-related cancers for occasional smokers was 1.24 times that of those who have never smoked at all but the result was not statistically significant. (For a confidence interval of 95%, this data showed an incidence rate ratio of 0.80 to 1.94.)"

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10552-006-0068-9

Article Doesn't Reflect Latest Research

There is "No Clear Link Between Passive Smoking and Lung Cancer" per Journal of the National Cancer Research Institute, December 17, 2013. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.58.238.95 (talk) 22:24, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

I added a comment on this study under Effects. It seems appropriate given that it is the largest and most recent study on the subject, and plenty of smaller and older individual studies are directly referenced.Darkthlayli (talk) 18:42, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
That is a primary source. We should be using review articles and other high quality secondary sources per WP:MEDRS Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 11:30, 30 May 2015 (UTC)
Firstly, I added the primary source to a long list of other primary sources, that had been there for years until you removed it. It is... interesting that these primary sources bothered no one until an important primary source took an opposing viewpoint and was added. Secondly, this article is still littered with references to primary sources, which you apparently are not interested in replacing. But thirdly, note the following quote from the Misplaced Pages Policy you so thoughtfully referenced for me.
  "If the conclusions of the research are worth mentioning (for instance, publication of a large, randomized clinical trial with surprising results), they should be described as being from a single study, for example:
  "A large, NIH-funded study published in 2010 found that selenium and Vitamin E supplements increased the risk of prostate cancer; it was thought they would prevent prostate cancer." (citing PMID 20924966)
  After enough time has passed for a review in the area to be published, the review should be cited in preference to the primary study.
Well, this is precisely a large trial with surprising results (not to anyone with knowledge of the field, but certainly to anyone who relied upon this article for their information), and enough time has not passed since its publication for a review to include it. Digging indicates that your secondary source nowhere considered this study (not surprising since it is from late 2013 and this review is dated 2014, but really is much older than that). So I don't think WP:MEDRS in any way precludes inclusion of this reference.
But just from a common sense perspective, can it really be right not to mention the largest, most recent study if its conclusions fly in the face of the article's text, given that no reputable researcher has even tried to impugn the study (as in the case of Enstrom and Kabat, say)?
This article has used too many primary sources for some time. The solution is not to use even more primary sources but to replace them with secondary sources. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:46, 30 May 2015 (UTC)
There was many issues with this paper including that they state "It’s hard to say anything conclusive with such small numbers” And they did find some concern "The only category of exposure that showed a trend toward increased risk was living in the same house with a smoker for 30 years or more. In that group, the hazard ratio for developing lung cancer was 1.61, but the confidence interval included 1.00, making the finding of only borderline statistical significance." Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:52, 30 May 2015 (UTC)
These were not "issues" with the paper, and have not been raised by the scientific community as problems with it. Every study has its limitations. In fact, the study is the largest of its kind - no other study on secondhand smoke and lung cancer boasts as high a sample size. And if a category which includes an increased hazard ratio but whose confidence interval includes 1.00 is grounds for concern, then there is nothing in this world that does not merit concern, and there are literally 100 of categories in each study and some will show increased hazard ratios by chance. To say the finding was of "borderline statistical significance" is nonsensical - it was not because the confidence interval included 1.00. The fact remains that the researchers themselves said there was no clear link between lung cancer and secondhand smoke, and no one has impugned the study, including the commenter you quote. Reference to this study, the largest and most recent of its kind and in clear contradiction of the prior statements, needs to be in this article or the article is just not complete. I plan on adding it back and will take the issue to administrators if you seek to delete it, as its removal represents clear POV pushing.Darkthlayli (talk) 17:27, 30 May 2015 (UTC)
For reference the underlying study is PMID 25316260.

No it's not POV-pushing, it's adherence to WP:MEDRS the medical sourcing guideline. Has the study been taken into account in a high-quality literature review? If so we might be able to use the review, but this a primary study.

Here's something very strange, the Peres article says "found no link between and secondhand smoke" but the abstract of the study itself says "Among NS, prolonged passive adult home exposure tended to increase lung cancer risk." I'm having trouble reconciling the two.

The other side of "Nobody has discredited this study" is, "If the study is so good and useful, how come it hasn't been picked up in a literature review?" Without a good, high-quality WP:MEDRS-compliant secondary source, the article shouldn't be quoting this (or any other) primary source. Zad68 02:29, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Adding, OK I see it in Results but not Conclusions: "Among NS, any passive smoking exposure did not significantly increase lung cancer risk." Without a well-qualified defintion of "any" this is hard to use. Again, we should be looking to secondary sources and not cherry-picking items not even included in the conclusions of primary studies. Zad68 02:36, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

I have previously made the point, but will make it again, that it is not included in literature reviews precisely because it is recent. To accuse me of cherry-picking for using the largest and most recent study is disingenuous at best. And as has also been said, you are not adhering to Misplaced Pages policy by deleting this reference - the cited policy makes specific provisions for just this type of primary study. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.80.187.189 (talk) 03:49, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Article is cartoonishly biased – we need cleaner science on Misplaced Pages

This article is most politically biased science article I've yet seen on Misplaced Pages. We have a serious problem on Misplaced Pages of science pages being hijacked by political activists. It makes Misplaced Pages much less credible.

The section Controversy Over Harm has the following subsections:

6.1 Industry-funded studies and critiques 6.2 Tobacco industry response 6.3 US racketeering lawsuit against tobacco companies

I assume I don't need to explain how absurdly biased and one-sided this is.

The Wang, et al study is a very high-quality study and avoids the problem of recall bias. It found no evidence of increased lung cancer risk except in women who live with a smoker for more than 30 years. I just added it earlier today and another editor deleted the sentence and rewrote it to spin it as "prolonged exposure increases risk" or something like that, deleting the fact that it's only people who live with a smoker for more than 30 years. This is a ridiculous, irresponsible approach to science.

We also need to abandon the dichotomous oversimplification of risk and actually specify risks. "Increases risk" is extremely misleading when the risk is a very low probability. We need more rigor and more statistics knowledge. — Preceding unsigned comment added by BlueSingularity (talk • contribs) 00:59, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

Political activists like the Surgeon General, IARC and World Health Organization? They all state similar conclusions. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 07:10, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

Indeed, "increases risk" is incredibly vague, and does not indicate statistical significance. A study run by someone who expects a certain conclusion may point to "increased risk" by only paying attention to statistical differences that support their opinion, despite infinitesimal statistical significance. This was part of the US District Court's issue with the EPA study that the court threw out, claiming it was "cherry picked." Vacating that judgment was only done on the basis that the study carried no regulatory weight, not a refutation of the study's court-acknowledged lack of scientific basis.

This article shows it's bias from the beginning, starting with such unscientific language as this: "The health risks of second-hand smoke are a matter of scientific consensus," despite the fact that the legislatively most important large study done on the issue, that concluded SHS was a risk factor for various things, was thrown out by a District Court for making conclusions before research, in the court's own words, "EPA publicly committed to a conclusion before research had begun" in addition to significant other violations of sound scientific procedure and the EPA's own policies. The "scientific consensus" statement, which defines the nonobjective tone which continues through the entire article, is refuted as well by the fact that there have been several major scientific studies done which refute the causal link between SHS and cancer or other maladies. That the author may not like the political or industrial funding behind such studies does not exclude them from being part of the community of scientists who create "scientific consensus," nor does it necessarily make the scientists of whose conclusions the author approves any less influenced by political interests. The opposite statement could just as easily be made, depending upon one's view of who has more scientific credibility. Such a blanket statement simply should not be made in a forum that expects to have any credibility. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.28.66.163 (talk) 18:34, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

I entirely agree with the above editor. This article is obviously heavily biased. SmokeyTheCat 19:04, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
Suggest you review the cited sources. Tong & Glantz are pretty direct about it. LeadSongDog come howl! 22:04, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
The article needs re-writing by someone who hasn't swallowed the currently fashionable and very obvious anti-smoking zeitgeist. The Greeks smoke twice as much as the British and live just as long. The Japanese smoke nearly twice as much and live longer. And that's active smoking. So how can passive smoking be anything but completely trivial? Anyone interested can confirm what I write by comparing the tables here on Smoking by Country with Smoking by Life Expectancy. I don't have links on this but it's still true. There is so much anti-smoking propaganda that is has now become apparently the norm but propaganda it remains. Misplaced Pages should be above this but sadly it presently isn't on this issue. SmokeyTheCat 01:39, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Ref summary

First of all we should generally not use primary sources per WP:MEDRS so maybe we should trim

Second the source says "Among NS, prolonged passive adult home exposure tended to increase lung cancer risk" which is better summarized as "Prolonged secondhand smoke exposure also increases the risk of lung cancer" than "However, more recent research has found little or no harm from secondhand smoke except for those who had lived with a smoker for at least 30 years." Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 07:00, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

I support efforts to add more of the extensive documentation of harm caused by passive smoking, in spite of the well-documented campaign to suppress and confuse evidence about this issue. Reify-tech (talk) 22:09, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
What 'well-documented campaign' ? I don't know where you live, Reify-tech, but here in the UK there is a blanket ban on smoking in all public enclosed spaces and despite the fact that 6,000 pubs have closed because of the ban, benefiting no-one, and not the slightest talk of moderating the ban by any of the legislators. Indeed there is deranged talk of increasing the ban to include open-air public spaces likes parks and squares. ASH, the largest but not the only anti-smoking lobbying group, employs twenty people full-time to continue to churn ever more anti-smoking propaganda while Forest the only group which represents the UK's ten million smokers has but a single employee. SmokeyTheCat 09:33, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
Would help if you would provide refs. The talk page is not a soap box. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:36, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Yes please see WP:NOTAFORUM... Misplaced Pages articles need to document what's happening but article Talk pages are not for discussing personal opinions about article topics. Zad68 02:14, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

The whole article is a soapbox for the currently fashionable Healthist anti-smoking hysteria. SmokeyTheCat 10:52, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

Requested move 16 August 2015

It has been proposed in this section that Passive smoking be renamed and moved to Secondhand smoke.

A bot will list this discussion on the requested moves current discussions subpage within an hour of this tag being placed. The discussion may be closed 7 days after being opened, if consensus has been reached (see the closing instructions). Please base arguments on article title policy, and keep discussion succinct and civil.

Please use {{subst:requested move}}. Do not use {{requested move/dated}} directly. Links: current log • target log • direct move

Passive smoking → Secondhand smoke – "Secondhand smoke" is the primary name for this topic used by the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, the American Lung Association and the CDC. Everymorning (talk) 18:28, 16 August 2015 (UTC) Relisted. Jenks24 (talk) 12:13, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

  • Might could be but there's no consensus in the archives and the current article uses both American and British English. If we're establishing a consensus now, my own preference would be to resolve the tie in favor of American English, as spoken and read by a much wider audience in general and on Misplaced Pages in particular. The objective thing to do per WP:ENGVAR, though, is to see who got in the first edit. Looks like that was the Brits. So it should remain at passive smoking unless enough Brits also use secondhand smoke that we can find MOS:COMMONALITY. Certainly SHS is the preferred American name for the phenomenon, as documented by User:Everymorning. Can anyone see what the British National Health Service or Lancet uses? — LlywelynII 01:02, 17 August 2015 (UTC)
    On NHS's "Smokefree" site, this page uses "second-hand smoke" with a hyphen and this one uses "secondhand smoke" without one. No "passive smoking" in sight. So... good to go? — LlywelynII 01:09, 17 August 2015 (UTC)
Tom (LT) By making the Ngram search case insensitive and by extending the time frame to 2008, the results favour secondhand smoke. However I would be interested to know if people in the US have heard of passive smoking. I don't remember hearing usage of secondhand smoke. GregKaye 04:19, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
90.192.101.114 has no point. The article started at passive smoking. Passive smoking is the default term, and should not be changed, per ENGVAR. RGloucester — ☎ 00:35, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
Categories: