Revere has spoken out in support of Michael Siegel at The Rest of the Story. Dr. Siegel is a public health specialist that focuses on among other things the effects of second-hand smoke.
Siegel took Action for Smoking and Health -- an anti-smoking group -- to task for the following statement:
3. Even for people without such respiratory conditions, breathing drifting tobacco smoke for even brief periods can be deadly. For example, the Centers for Disease Controls [CDC] has warned that breathing drifting tobacco smoke for as little as 30 minutes ( less than the time one might be exposed outdoors on a beach, sitting on a park bench, listening to a concert in a park, etc.) can raise a nonsmoker's risk of suffering a fatal heart attack to that of a smoker [7].
Siegel challenged anti-smoking groups to provide evidence for such a statement:
I am challenging TobaccoScam, as well as other advocates and anti-smoking groups which have attacked me for criticizing what I believe are highly deceptive public communications, to provide evidence of each of the following:
1. Please document that the CDC has warned that 30 minutes of secondhand smoke exposure increases a nonsmoker's risk of suffering a fatal heart attack to the same level as that of active smokers.
2. Please provide the scientific evidence to back up the assertion that 30 minutes of secondhand smoke exposure increases a nonsmoker's risk of suffering a fatal heart attack to the same level as that of active smokers.
He has a received a bunch of flack for asking questions.
Let's not equivocate here. The tobacco companies have said some insane and deliberately inaccurate things over the years for which they should be distrusted. Exaggerations by anti-smoking groups are miniscule when compared to tobacco companies' flagrant lies. I approve of smoking bans in bars and workplaces. Smoking in these settings is in my opinion a great example of a negative externality, and thus it is fair game for government regulation if that regulation is likely to be effective which in this case it is. (Although I remain somewhat skeptical that allowing bars to decide whether they wanted to be no smoking or smoking and allowing patrons to segregate by preference would not have been effective...but that is an argument for another day.)
However, it is always acceptable in a scientific debate to demand evidence for an broad assertion. Siegel has every right to be skeptical of broad claims made by anti-smoking groups; he has every right to question them on the validity of their data. Science suffers when people view all assertions by their side completely uncritically. And it isn't really that much of an issue for ASH to just retract the statement and say, "Hey, our bad." They might suffer over the short-term, but over the long-term people will respect their honesty.
I would take this one step further though. I think this is an excellent example of why it is always a bad idea for scientists to exaggerate even when they think it is for a good cause. Whenever scientists exaggerate, we hand a counter-argument to those who would deny science on a silver platter. We damage our own credibility, and this damaged credibility often lasts much longer than the issue that we were hoping to solve.
The idea that smoking is bad for you doesn't need to be oversold. It sells itself. Likewise, for global warming and stem cell research. The evidence speaks for itself on these issues; they do not require embellishment.
We also need to be very careful to correct them when activist groups take science and run with it. When we allow activist groups to speak as proxies for science, we may very well be blamed for their inaccuracies. I think that Siegel is doing a good thing, and in the end it will be the anti-smoking activist groups that will suffer. Revere is dead-on:
Because of their lack of respect for the truth, prominent members of the tobacco control community are in turn losing the respect of the academic community. Even as they try to isolate Mike Siegel, they are finding he can't be isolated because most public health scientists, not blinded by their own zeal to rid the world of a true scourge, agree with Siegel, not his critics. He will soldier on despite being excluded from their inner circle. And he'll do it with intellectual honesty.
The public's trust is the scientific community's most valuable asset, and we need to continue to justify that trust with honesty about the facts.
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I'm of two minds on Mike Siegel. For the reasons why, check out the comment I left on Revere's post. (I'm too lazy to reproduce the whole thing here.)
I'm really starting to wonder about Mike Siegel. Lately he's been frequently in the company of some pretty radical smoker's right's group members. Some of their claims have gone so far as to suggest that second hand smoke has a protective effect on children. Mr Siegel's credibility is threatened if he doesn't soon distance himself from some of their more extreme views.
Mike Siegel is no smoker's rights partisan. He is one of the staunchest and fiercest opponents of the tobacco industry I know (and I know him personally). That doesn't mean he checks his honesty at the door. Pete is helping to perpetuate a smear, I hope unknowingly.
Pete: "Some of their claims have gone so far as to suggest that second hand smoke has a protective effect on children."
How would you interpret the finding of a statistically significant RR of 0.78 in this study without compromising the much smaller and statistically not significant RRs for SHS at home: http://jncicancerspectrum.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/jnci;90/19/144…
to clarify my above statement: ... RR of 0.78 for children living with smoking parents ..
benpal,
An RR of 0.78 is "no significance". Generally an RR of 3.0 and above would show significance. This article clearly rejects SHS being a cause of lung cancer.
Owl, I could be wrong, but my understanding is that an RR of 0.78 represents a protective effect. If the confidence interval (CI) includes 1.00 then it could be said to be statistically insignificant. If I recall correctly, it was a study funded by the WHO that found SHS has a small protective effect in children for Lung Cancer.
Doesn't the .78 finding only show how imprecise these studies are? I think Enstrom is right, if ETS does present a life risk, it is too small for these studies to measure.
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/326/7398/1057
"I approve of smoking bans in bars..." ...that regulation is likely to be effective..."
Effective at what? Inconveniencing and/or shaming smokers, which will encourage them to quit smoking? I suspect you don't like it when religious folk legislate their morality. What makes you, and the rest of the anti-smoker nannies, any better? At least the religious nuts believe they're telling the truth. The anti-smoker nuts are very happy to lie to get their way.
But you don't even need an ostensive reason. You know what's good for others, and happily support legislation to coerce their behavior.
The bar belongs to the bar owner - not to you, nor to the government. Please feel free to open your own non-smoking bar, or restaurant! People have the right to enjoy themselves anyway they like - as long as they're not harming others. And it's quite clear that smoking harms only the cigarette smoker. People need to learn to mind their own business. I mean, it is supposed to be a free country!