Lancet Publishes Study Critical Of Second Hand Smoke

[Madeline]

The study was paid for by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare and Bloomberg Philanthropies. It was published Friday in the British medical journal Lancet.

"This helps us understand the real toll of tobacco," said Armando Peruga, a program manager at the World Health Organization's Tobacco-Free Initiative, who led the study. He said the approximately 603,000 deaths from second-hand smoking should be added to the 5.1 million deaths that smoking itself causes every year.

Second-hand smoke kills more than half a million a year, study reports | cleveland.com

Yet another "scientific study"?

Epidemiological research is a type of observational research in which the researcher applies statistical methods to analyse patterns of occurrence of disease and its association with other phenomena within a population, with a view to understanding the origins or mode of transmission of the disease.

epidemiological research - definition of epidemiological research by the Online Dictionary from Datasegment.com

Apparently the study's authors concluded that 600,000 deaths a year worldwide are due to secondhand smoke. The causes of death the authors chose to attribute to secondhand smoke include heart disease, lower respiratory infections, asthma, lung cancer and sudden infant death syndrome.

Here's a few problems:

* How would you ever correct for varying standards of post morteum science around the world? If the data on cause of death itself is unreliable, what sound conclusions could possibly be based on it?

* SIDS is not a cause of death; it is a concession by the pathologist that no other cause of death has been found.

* The authors assume (I assume) that secondhand smoke can lead to heart disease and lung cancer just as smoking can. Tempting as it may be to jump this conclusion, to my knowledge there just is not enough evidence to support it.

* Did the authors make any effort to control for such factors as pollution, nutrition, prenatal care, etc.? If not, how can it be scientifically sound to conclude two people living vastly different lives in different parts of the world have died "from secondhand smoke"?

The entire article is here, if you care to read it......

Worldwide burden of disease from exposure to second-hand smoke: a retrospective analysis of data from 192 countries : The Lancet

This seems like junk science to me.

Your thoughts?