Comment: Oh, puh-lease! The entire point of this article is clearly stated in the final line: "The researchers found higher support for home smoking bans among people who believed that third-hand smoke is dangerous." The anti-smoking Nazis are preparing their final battle -- reaching into the homes of smokers to crush the nasty habit and turn smoking parents into criminals. They are seeking support for such bans.

Please note that the study discussed in the article was an investigation into "parents' attitudes". It was not a study into the real dangers of this so-called third-hand smoke. It is based upon the junk science served up over the last forty years that pretends that second-hand smoke is dangerous. However, the studies done in Sweden that show that children who are raised in homes with smokers have a greater resistance to lung cancer later in life are not mentioned. We wonder why? Well, not really. We know why. Smoking is the poster boy of the new authoritarians, the beachhead established to acclimatize us all into accepting ever greater restrictions on our civil liberties.

Whenever a study on smoking comes from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, run the other way or read the funnies. Consider the claim:

"Secondhand smoke causes an estimated 46,000 heart disease deaths and about 3,000 lung cancer deaths among nonsmokers each year, according to statistics cited by the CDC."

One might be tempted to think that the statistics they cite are numbers of actual deaths based upon death certificates. But as Don Oakley shows in his book Slow Burn, these are "statistics" generated by computer models.

But how does the CDC arrive at its calculations from those state reports? At least one enterprising reporter, Nickie McWhirter of The Detroit News, tried to find out. Her article was posted on the Internet by the American Smokers Alliance. She wrote:

I recently read that 435,000 Americans die every year from smoking-related illnesses. That sounds like a rock-hard, irrefutable fact, and pretty scary. How are such statistics determined? I phoned the American Lung Association's Southfield office to find out.

No one there seemed to know. However, a friendly voice said most such numbers come from the National Center for Health Statistics. That's a branch of the National Centers for Disease Control. The friendly voice provided a phone number in New York City. Wrong number. The New York office collects only morbidity [the rate of occurrence of a disease] data, I was told. I needed mortality data [the death rate].

Several bureaucratically misdirected calls later, I spoke with someone in Statistical Resources at NCHS. He said his office collects mortality based on death certificates. Progress! Data is categorized by race, sex, age, geographic location, he said, but not smoking. Never. No progress.

He suggested I phone the Office of Smoking and Health, Rockville, Md., and provided a number. That phone had been disconnected.

Was I discouraged? No! Ultimately, and several unfruitful phone calls later, I found a government information officer in Washington, D.C., with a relatively new phone directory and a helpful attitude. She found a listing for the elusive Office on Smoking and Health in Atlanta.

Bingo! Noel Barith, public information officer, said the 435,000 figure probably came from its computers. S&H generates lots of statistics concerning "smoking-related" stuff, he said. It's all done according to a formula programmed into the computers.

Really? Since I had already determined that no lifestyle data on individual patients and their medical histories is ever collected, how can the computer possibly decide deaths are smoking related? Barith didn't know. Maybe the person who devised this computer program knows. Barith promised to have a computer expert return my call. The next day, SAMMEC Operations Manager, Richard Lawton, phoned. SAMMEC, I learned, is the name of the computer program. Its initials stand for Smoking Attributed Morbidity, Mortality and Economic Cost.

The computer is fed raw data and SAMMEC employs various complex mathematical formulas to determine how many people in various age groups, locations, and heaven knows what other categories are likely to get sick or die from what diseases and how many of these can be assumed to be smoking related.

Assumed? This is all guesswork? Sort of. Lawton confirmed that no real people, living or dead, are studied, no doctors consulted, no environmental factors considered.

Lawton was absolutely lyrical about SAMMEC and its capabilities, however, provided one can feed it appropriate SAFs. What are SAFs?

"That's the smoking attributable fraction for each disease or group of people studied," he said. It sounded like handicapping horses. Lawton began to explain how to arrive at an SAF, using an equation that reminded me of Miss Foster's algebra class.

"Wait a minute!" I commanded. "I don't need to know that. I need to know if the SAFs and all the rest of this procedure yield valid, factual information. To know that we must know if sometime, somewhere, some human being or human beings actually looked at records of other human beings, smokers and nonsmokers, talked to their doctors, gathered enough information from reality to BEGIN to devise a mathematical formula that MIGHT be applied to large groups of people much later, without ever needing to study those people, and could be expected to yield TRUE FACTS within a reasonable margin of error. Who did that? Can you tell me, Mr. SAMMEC expert?" [Caps in original.]

Nice guy, Mr. Lawton, but he didn't have a clue. He said he thought the original work concerning real people, their deaths and evidence of smoking involvement was part of work done by a couple of epidemiologists, A.M. and D.E. Lilienfield. It's all in a book titled Foundations of Epidemiology, published about 1980 by Oxford University Press, he said. SAMMEC came later, based on the Lilienfield's [sic] work. Maybe. He wasn't sure.

I was unable to find the book, or the Lilienfields.

So there you have it. Research shall continue, but so far it has only revealed that no one churning out statistics knows anything about smoking and its relationship, if any, to diseases and death. A computer knows everything, based on mystical formulas of unknown origin, content and reliability. Raw data in, startling statistics out. SAMMEC speaks, truth is revealed! Oh, brave new world. Are there 435,000 smoking-related deaths per year in America? Maybe. I can tell you this with absolute certainty, however: No human beings are ever studied to find out. 32

[32. Nickie McWhirter, "Computer blows out smoking-related death figures with no real human facts." The Detroit News, October 18, 1992. Cited in Don Oakley, Slow Burn, pp 240-42.]