With no new real science on the effects of smoking being undertaken for decades the anti smoking movement has for some time manipulated statistics to attack the source of their obsessive hatred; as those decades have passed the levels to which that movement have stooped have got steadily lower.
Perhaps the most repulsive abuse of statistics has been the claimed reductions in heart attacks following smoking bans where heart disease is apparently and miraculously cured in just a few weeks simply by breathing smoke free air in the local pub.
The latest study from Indiana University gives the rather headline grabbing claim; ‘heart attacks in non smokers reduced by 70% since smoking ban’, but this unbelievable figure is really true……. Well it is really true for the 22 heart attack patients they actually studied !!
This university has broken the two most basic and fundamental rules of statistical analysis; 1. The smaller the study size the greater the likelihood of the result occurring purely by chance and 2. Just because B follows A it doesn’t mean that A caused B. Never mind that the world’s leading heart surgeons tell us that it takes decades to develop atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) with many other factors like lack of exercise and poor diet; never mind that common sense tells us that healthy people don’t drop dead after sitting next to a smoker for two hours on a Friday night, anti-smoking statistics tells us otherwise.
Picking a study group of 22 in the U.S. population is like picking a small back street in a rural town and declaring road deaths are down, so you would have to ask the questions why would a university release such garbage? Why would newspapers around the globe print it? And why do governments act upon such nonsense?
The short answer is money and power; the university releases its headlines to Reuters ensuring worldwide publicity and further funding from anti-smoking groups and companies; the newspapers print the sensational headlines to sell more copies and to keep their best advertising customers in the pharmaceuticals industry happy and the politicians get to say they have saved us all from the "silent killer" while at the same time driving up stealth taxes.
The truth of the matter is, it should be illegal to perform a statistical study on just 22 people and call it science.
Key Facts:
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S.A with 1.5 million heart attacks per year (one every 21 seconds)
Despite smoking bans being implemented across America since the mid 90’s the American Heart Association have stated that the prevalence of Coronary Heart Disease in the United States has increased 2 to 3 fold in the last 15 years.
The age adjusted rate of fatality from heart attacks has been declining for the past few years due to improved treatments although that decline is now slowing.
The World Health Organization has predicted that Coronary Heart Disease will replace pneumonia as the world’s number one disease burden by 2020.
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