Jump to full article: New York Post, 2009-10-24
Author: JACOB SULLUM
Intro: Six years ago, when I asked an epidemiologist about a report that a smoking ban in Helena, Mont., had cut heart attacks by 40 percent within six months, he thought the idea was so ridiculous that no one would take it seriously.
He was wrong. . . .
a closer look at the IOM report, which was commissioned by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suggests its conclusions are based on a desire to promote smoking bans rather than a dispassionate examination of the evidence. . . .
The largest study of this issue, which used nationwide data instead of looking at cherry-picked communities, concluded that smoking bans in America "are not associated with statistically significant short-term declines in mortality or hospital admissions for myocardial infarction."
It also found that "large short-term increases in myocardial infarction incidence following a workplace ban are as common as the large decreases reported in the published literature."
That study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in March, suggests that publication bias -- the tendency to report positive findings and ignore negative ones -- explains the "consistent" results highlighted by the IOM committee. But even though the panelists say they tried to compensate for publication bias by looking for relevant data that did not appear in medical journals, they ignored the NBER paper, along with analyses that found no declines in heart attacks following smoking bans in California, Florida, New York, Oregon, England, Wales and Scotland. . . .
Even while taking refuge in imprecision, the IOM committee tries to make transparently absurd claims seem plausible by intimating that spending a half-hour in a smoky bar just might kill you, even if you were completely healthy when you went in. If so, where are the bodies? The report concedes that "there is no direct evidence that a relatively brief exposure to secondhand smoke can precipitate an acute coronary event."
Siegel, who faults the IOM committee's "sensationalistic" approach, is a longtime backer of smoking bans who nevertheless tries to separate his political advocacy from his scientific analysis.
It's too bad the authors of the IOM report, who immediately used it as an excuse to demand strict smoking regulations throughout the country, did not follow his example.
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