whether old or new the fact is second hand smoke hasnt ever changed. The science studying it hasnt changed either.What has changed is the way the anti-tobacco lobby uses psuedo-science to instill fear in the general population. Point is second hand smoke doesnt harm anybody and never has.......hatred of smokers and prohibition a political force is whats pushing these bans. The day the anti-smoking nazis went for outdoor bans they destroyed their own argument on indoor bans.......and the people have seen it. I plan to destroy the basic building stone on which your bans are built.........the house of glass that houses the second hand smoke lies is about to shatter......Your problem is you have to many diferent groups making the wildest claims via psudo-hyoped studies or just fraudulent polls that smoke free themselves put together..........then the highered lobbyists at acs and there internet hacksters spreading even more fraud and propaganda.........sorry but you lose and the american people will win the day against your treasonous lot.

Harleyrider, why must you insist on posting the same cut and paste tobacco company PR and propaganda all over the worldwideweb. Anyone who can do any research knows that what you're posting has been proven to be wrong many times over many years. .

Scientific Principles Ignored

An even greater problem is the agency's lowering of the confidence interval (CI) used in its report. Epidemiologists calculate confidence intervals to express the likelihood a result could happen just by chance. A CI of 95 percent allows a 5 percent possibility that the results occurred only by chance.

Before its 1992 report, EPA had always used epidemiology's gold standard CI of 95 percent to measure statistical significance. But because the U.S. studies chosen for the report were not statistically significant within a 95 percent CI, for the first time in its history EPA changed the rules and used a 90 percent CI, which doubled the chance of being wrong.

This allowed it to report a statistically significant 19 percent increase of lung cancer cases in the nonsmoking spouses of smokers over those cases found in nonsmoking spouses of nonsmokers. Even though the RR was only 1.19--an amount far short of what is normally required to demonstrate correlation or causality--the agency concluded this was proof SHS increased the risk of U.S. nonsmokers developing lung cancer by 19 percent.
EPA Study Soundly Rejected

In November 1995 after a 20-month study, the Congressional Research Service released a detailed analysis of the EPA report that was highly critical of EPA's methods and conclusions. In 1998, in a devastating 92-page opinion, Federal Judge William Osteen vacated the EPA study, declaring it null and void. He found a culture of arrogance, deception, and cover-up at the agency.

Osteen noted, "First, there is evidence in the record supporting the accusation that EPA 'cherry picked' its data. ... In order to confirm its hypothesis, EPA maintained its standard significance level but lowered the confidence interval to 90 percent. This allowed EPA to confirm its hypothesis by finding a relative risk of 1.19, albeit a very weak association. ... EPA cannot show a statistically significant association between [SHS] and lung cancer."
In 2003 a definitive paper on SHS and lung cancer mortality was published in the British Medical Journal. It is the largest and most detailed study ever reported. The authors studied more than 35,000 California never-smokers over a 39-year period and found no statistically significant association between exposure to SHS and lung cancer mortality.
Propaganda Trumps Science

The 1992 EPA report is an example of the use of epidemiology to promote belief in an epidemic instead of to investigate one. It has damaged the credibility of EPA and has tainted the fields of epidemiology and public health.

In addition, influential anti-tobacco activists, including prominent academics, have unethically attacked the research of eminent scientists in order to further their ideological and political agendas.

The abuse of scientific integrity and the generation of faulty "scientific" outcomes (through the use of pseudoscience) have led to the deception of the American public on a grand scale and to draconian government overregulation and the squandering of public money.

Millions of dollars have been spent promoting belief in SHS as a killer, and more millions of dollars have been spent by businesses in order to comply with thousands of highly restrictive bans, while personal choice and freedom have been denied to millions of smokers. Finally, and perhaps most tragically, all this has diverted resources away from discovering the true cause(s) of lung cancer in nonsmokers.

Dr. Jerome Arnett Jr. (jerry.arnett@gmail.com) is a pulmonologist who lives in Helvetia, West Virginia.

Just a reminder of the sources of the bans:

http://www.rwjf.org/pr/product.jsp?ia=143&id=14912

And what the 99 million dollars was going to. Note on page seven, patios later, and page eight, voting not allowed

http://www.no-smoke.org/pdf/CIA_Fundamentals.pdf