Tag Archives: thirdhand smoke

Researchers Admit Thirdhand Smoke Study Is An Advocacy Piece

In a research grant application to the state of Califnornia for funding into a study on thirdhand smoke, the researchers openly admitted that the purpose of the study was not to explore the potential harm of thirdhand smoke, but to push for further bans.

“Overall, our proposed work will be a critical step in a timely assessment of whether the THS exposure is genetically harmful to exposed nonsmokers, and the ensuing data will serve as the experimental evidence for framing and enforcing policies prohibiting smoking in homes, hotels, and cars in California and elsewhere in order to protect vulnerable people.”

Ok, so when the funding comes from the Tobacco Related Disease Research Program there’s no surprise the grant was given or that the researchers were unashamed to admit their despicable agenda. Still, though, why is such a program allowed to exist in the first place, especially when it lacks the objectivity that a science program should exhibit?

What this really means is that individuals with a prejudice agenda are able to openly admit it and receive lavish amounts of money in return. It’s a shame that America has just celebrated Martin Luther King day, a man who is revered for helping to erode social segregation, but simultaneously it is working hard to segregate another group of society – even fabricating evidence to do so.

Thirdhand Smoke: The Plot Thickens

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Since my last blog post about thirdhand smoke and Winickoff’s bogus study to further the anti-smoking ideology, I contacted the man himself with queries about his findings. I sent him the following email:

Dr Winickoff,

I read your latest ‘report’ with mixed feelings of great amusement and sadness. I fail to see exactly how you can claim that tobacco smoke travels down telephone lines and “air ducts, through cracks in the walls and floors, through elevator shafts, and along plumbing and electrical lines to affect units on other floors.”

Of course, I would be able to grasp rudimentary understanding of these claims had you provided evidence, but as you didn’t, I can’t. Referring to your own non-study on third-hand smoke is not proof of concept, especially when said non-study was utterly ridiculous anyway – sorry, but phoning people and asking if ‘third-hand smoke’ existed would it prompt them to quit smoking is not, in any level of study, demonstrative proof that third-hand smoke a) exists or b) poses a threat. The first rule of toxicology is the poison is the dose and furthermore, you admitted some time ago that third-hand smoke is mere smell.

You claim in your ‘report’ that Georg Matt and two other studies show that lingering tobacco toxins reach high levels, yet the levels are actually so low as to be barely present. Moreover, none of the three referenced studies mention tobacco smoke travelling between apartments. You must surely be aware that fabricating an argument is not science, is not persuasive, and actually means the evidence is lacking and therefore your entire premise is baseless?

It still perplexes me that decades ago upwards of 80% of American and British adult males smoked, in any area they pleased besides libraries, galleries and churches. If tobacco posed such a threat that the slightest wisp can cause disease, then living in a perpetual fog of the stuff should surely have killed off a vast percentage of the population. Instead, we saw a baby boom and generations getting stronger and living longer. While smoking rates dropped, cancer rates increased. While smoking rates dropped, asthma rates increased.

Please, can you provide justification for your continued insistence of the health threat of third-hand smoke and these notions that second-hand smoke can travel along plumbing and phone lines to pose a threat to neighbours?

Thanks,
Rich

This initially received no reply, so I sent a follow-up email asking for a response and received this:

Thank you for your interest and intellectual engagement. Many of the compounds exhibit a stochastic pattern of harm. Understanding this concept will help you understand the science better.

Your Home is Not Safe

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Most of us knew the ‘discovery’ of thirdhand smoke was nothing more than a new political leverage for the anti-smokers; something they could use to deny smokers fostering, adopting, teaching and smoking at home. This could never happen straight away, but in small increments. With vindication that we never wanted, this turned out to be exactly the case. In the USA especially, smokers are increasingly demonised and an increasing number of businesses refuse to employ smokers – even if they smoke outside of working hours. This is spreading to anyone using NRT, presumably in case they ‘relapse’ and go back to tobacco. Anyone following the F2C blog will be aware of the fuss Grampian hospitals have been kicking up to refuse anyone smoking on the grounds, including patients, with the penalty being that treatment will be refused. Completely illegal of course, but that never stopped them trying.

Michael Siegel reported earlier in the week how a new study has claimed that secondhand smoke exposure causes poor performance academically. The first point of common-sense is to simply ask if SHS causes poor academic performance, how come active smoking has positively beneficial effects on the brain and concentration, and how did we ever evolve with people smoking for our entire history?

As you might have guessed, the study was a crock of shit, as it simultaneously measured self-reported secondhand smoke exposure and self-reported academic performance. In other words, people estimated how much passive smoke exposure they had (I couldn’t ever quantify that, could you?) and also stated their academic performance. Not exactly rigorous science by any stretch of the imagination. So how much did their performance suffer? “Students exposed to SHS at home 1 to 4 and 5 to 7 days per week were 14% (95% CI, 5%-25%) and 28% (15%-41%)”

So, uh, hardly at all. Averages of 14 and 28%? Come on now. No real scientist would ever genuinely consider that noteworthy, so what’s the agenda here?

If exposure to SHS could impair the students’ academic performance and hence reduce their chances to succeed, then home smokers are depriving the students’ human rights to higher education stipulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—Right to Education (Article 26), which states ‘higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.’

Tobacco control advocates, educators, and human right advocators can also make use of our evidence to negotiate an expansion of smoke-free legislation to the home environment.

Ahhhh. The tried and tested “for the sake of the children” argument. Or, put in a real context, ” we have no evidence whatsoever that tobacco smoke impairs academic performance or cognitive ability, so we’ll tug at the heart-strings instead.” Although it must be noted that the study author is using the term “evidence” incredibly loosely, and it’s admitted by the researchers that there was a significant margin of error:

Although restricting our analyses to nonsmokers only should have largely reduced the confounding effects of unfavorable lifestyle factors associated with smoking, residual confounding cannot be ruled out because of the crude self-reported measures of socioeconomic status and unmeasured lifestyle factors.

In other words, they were unaccounted variables that could, and most certainly would, have affected the results – and if the results were affected, then there would be no “evidence” to push for a home smoking ban, and that just won’t do at all. Moreover, as Siegel notes:

In addition, there are other important confounding variables, such as parental involvement with the child’s education. In other words, there are many reasons why children who are more heavily exposed to secondhand smoke may do poorer in school, and the study cannot adequately rule out these alternative explanations.

Therefore, it is mystifying why the study goes ahead and concludes that the observed association in the study is attributable to a direct, causal effect of secondhand smoke exposure.

 Siegel makes another excellent point, that “because the study is cross-sectional, it cannot establish whether the academic performance problems might have predated the secondhand smoke exposure.” What he means is, no base level of performance was taken. It’s all well and good comparing smoke-exposed to non-smoke-exposed children, but without comparing the same child’s performance before and after exposure began nothing is actually being measured at all.

 If a child typically scored 70-90% on tests, then was exposed to secondhand smoke and his grades went down to 40-50%, and all other variables had been accounted for e.g. general change in attitude towards studies, then a case could exist for secondhand smoke impairing academic performance. As it stands, however, all we have is more pseudo-science, political bullshit printed in a journal to win support.

Thirdhand Smoke Heats Up

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The first post of this new blog focuses on thirdhand smoke. It’s a sad state of affairs that this ridiculous notion is still getting attention, but on the plus side the attention is largely disproving the claim that it poses a health threat – though that isn’t stopping the anti-smoking HQ (California) devoting vast sums to “research” into thirdhand smoke. The Request for Proposals (RFP) to “undertake studies on Thirdhand Smoke and Cigarette Butt Waste, under a new initiative” is receiving approximately $3.75 million. Are these people unaware there is a recession and wasting public money should be curbed? Anyway, back to the study in hand.
This is possibly the first study that actually measures thirdhand smoke and compares it to secondhand smoke, which, frankly, is quite disappointing as it means the claims leveled against THS up to this point have been done with no basis. Then again, we already knew that. As Michael Siegel noted, the study, published in Tobacco Control, found that the concentrations of particulate matter in thirdhand smoke were 100 times lower than in secondhand smoke, measured in the same room.
The methodology was as follows:
“A smoking device burned 10 cigarettes in 30 minutes in a non-ventilated furnished room that was then kept closed. On the next day, for particle resuspension, we mobilised the dust on furniture, clothes and surfaces by wiping and shaking and created even more turbulence with a ventilator. An impactor (ELPI) measured the particle sizes (between 0.28 μm and 10 μm) and concentration in the air, 60 cm above the floor: on the first day before and after the cigarettes were smoked (secondhand smoke) then 4 hours later, 24 hours later, before and after resuspension manoeuvres (thirdhand smoke).”

The researchers found that:
“after cigarette smoking: the airborne particles … concentration was divided by 100 in the first 4 hours and again by 100 in the following 24 hours. After resuspension, the concentration was multiplied by 100, going back to that observed 4 hours after smoking.”

The study concludes: 
“These quantitative data support the hypothesis of a resuspension from the cigarette smoke surface contamination. However, this airborne contamination through resuspension remains much lower (100 times) than that of secondhand smoke. The rest of the aerosol mass initially produced by cigarettes could be firmly attached either to surfaces, leading to ingestion hazards and dermal transfer or to household dust and be inhaled with it.”
The first part of the conclusion clearly states to any rational person that the THS story should be put to bed. However, being tobacco control, such an admission could never be made and so they must resort to saying that “ingestion hazards” and inhalation risks exist. In theory, this may be true. In reality, this is true: thirdhand smoke exists, and there exists the possibility that some degree may be ingested, but the quantity would be so small as to be barely measureable. We already know that 90% of secondhand smoke is ordinary air and water, and that the risks of SHS are so negligible as to be more or less non-existant – only individuals with an almost unprecedented level of sensitivity are posed any harm, and such people are also threatened by day-to-day pollution, dust particles etc. So having established this, why should any person worry about particulate matter that measures in at 100 times lower than the essentially harmless secondhand smoke?
This study effectively demolishes the claims by Dr Winickoff and ASH etc, who roundly spew the garbage that a smoker with a lingering odour of tobacco poses a health threat to healthy co-workers, friends and family. Moreover, it certainly provides reason to abolish the absurd, but increasingly popular, trend of not hiring smokers solely because they smoke under the pretence that thirdhand smoke puts others at risk.