I say, Jeeves, damn fine book
Monday, December 8, 2008 Talking about books (see below), Dave Atherton has alerted me to Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology by Geoffrey Kabat.
Kabat is a cancer epidemiologist who is currently senior epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City (ie he's no fool). He is best known, perhaps, for the Enstrom/Kabat study into passive smoking which was peer reviewed and published in May 2003 by the British Medical Journal.
According to the study (the largest ever of its kind), the link between ETS and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than is generally believed. Together with James Enstrom (University of California), Kabat found that exposure to ETS, as estimated by smoking in spouses, was not significantly associated with death from coronary heart disease or lung cancer at any time or at any level of exposure.
These findings, said the authors, suggest that environmental tobacco smoke could not plausibly cause a 30% increased risk of coronary heart disease, as was generally believed, although a small effect cannot be ruled out.
Kabat's new book would seem to complement this report. "The media constantly bombard us with news of health hazards lurking in our everyday lives," says the blurb. "But many of these alleged hazards turn out to have been greatly overblown."
Hyping Health Risks is available HERE, price £10.89. Amazon customers who bought the book also bought What Risk? by Roger Bate, and The Road to Serfdom by Hayek. Curiously, they also bought Jeeves And Wooster: Complete ITV Series starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. What ho!
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Reader Comments (4)
"Curiously, they also bought Jeeves And Wooster: Complete ITV Series starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie."
Just goes to show how cool people who think ETS is a joke actually are!
It turns out now that irish bacon is contaminated due to contamination from herbisides and chemicals from a recycling plant that can lead to cancer.
Thousand of poor pigs will now be culled and then like the foot and mouth and mad cow disease it will be illiminated and everything will be all right because we'll all believe what they tell us and start eating bacon again.
Its funny isnt it how studies and reports by eminent scientists like Geoffrey Kabat proving that passive smoking causes no harm does not have the same reassuring affect on the same population.
I wonder why that is!
Apologies for the shameless self promotion but the Libertarian blog The Devil's Kitchen, voted the 7th most influential blog in the UK published my article. I hope we are making progress and please feel free to comment.
http://devilskitchen.me.uk/2008/11/what-you-didnt-read-this-week.html
Great article on Devil's Kitchen, Dave. What the hell was Kay Tie doing in a libertarian blog though?...she clearly doesn't get it!
Of all topics, from global warming to stem cells to the price of cheese, there is NOTHING like the topic of smoking that so comprehensively causes so many people's critical thinking to desert them. It beggars belief to read comments such as hers. She homes in like a guided missile onto her own perceptions about 'smelly smoke' etc and completely bypasses the obvious argument from our side that proposes her being fully able to go to a voluntarily smoke-free pub or to frequent smoke-free rooms. Over a year after the ban they are still arguing about our foisting of smoke on them when it was NEVER about doing that (ventilation, segregation etc)
God, there are some stupid people about