Monday
Sep142009
Just fancy that!
Monday, September 14, 2009 According to yesterday's Sunday Times, "The ban on public smoking has caused a fall in heart attack rates of about 10%, a study has found. Researchers commissioned by the Department of Health have found a far sharper fall than they had expected in the number of heart attacks in England in the year after the ban was imposed in July 2007."
Now, where have I heard that before? Oh yes, the same claim was made in Scotland in 2007, a year after the introduction of the smoking ban there. On that occasion we were told there has been a staggering 17 per cent fall in heart attacks. But it wasn't true.
Chris Snowdon has the full story HERE.
Reader Comments (24)
This is just more phoney figures to try and justify there unjust dictatorship law.
I find it bizarre that national newspapers have published this. It has now appeared in the Metro and the Mail. Do journalists not remember any of previous content of their papers? Do they not search their archives or make any attempt to investigate the background to the press releases they are given?
If any politician these days told me, that on a bright sunny day with not a cloud in the sky that the sun was shining - I'd call them a liar!
They obviously think that we are all as gullible and stupid as they are!
Apologies for the length Simon, but I hope in this case you can make an exception.
I have just rediscovered this in my library from March 2009 from the Rand Corporation. RC are an independent research organisation, and commissioned the Universities of Wisconsin and Stanford. They conducted research into 217,023 heart attack admissions 2 million heart attack deaths in 468 counties and 50 states of the United States over an 8 year period.
Their conclusions are: "In contrast with smaller regional studies, we find that workplace bans are not associated with statistically significant short-term declines in mortality or hospital admissions for myocardial infarction or other diseases. An analysis simulating smaller studies using subsamples reveals 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."
These are the words of Dr. Michael Siegel:
"This study fails to find any significant short-term effect of smoking bans on heart attack admissions or heart attack mortality, although a small effect cannot be ruled out. The study refutes the claims from previous studies that smoking bans result in a short-term reduction in heart attacks in the range of 20-40%, as many anti-smoking groups are asserting.
The most important finding of this study is that there are just as many smoking ban communities in which heart attack admissions and mortality have increased in comparison with control communities as there are smoking ban communities in which heart attacks have decreased relative to control communities. The mean difference was found to be zero."
"Thus, the study not only fails to find a short-term effect of smoking bans on heart attacks, but it also explains the positive findings of previous studies. What appears to be going on is what is referred to as publication bias." My words i.e. cheating.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14790.pdf
http://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com/2009/04/new-study-of-national-heart-attack.html
Apologies for the brevity Simon.
This "study" is utter bollocks.
Hi Colin,
Good to have your site back...will you be telling us more about this 'study'. Thanks.
Bring back hard-headed, shrewd, self-taught former copy boys who left school at 14 and worked their way up in newspapers, the ‘seen it all, I was there’ old sweats. Bring back journalists who drifted into the job after scraping a degree at Oxbridge. Bring back the riff-raff scribblers, the cashers of cheques at bars, the old shorthand wizard who would doff his hat and say: ‘I say old boy, could you sell me a cigarette.’ Bring back the chief subs who sensed a dodgy story at a thousand paces, the reporters who get drunk and return the next day to beg the pub landlord for forgiveness and a return to the fold. Journalism works best when its practitioners are outsiders. Journalism has been called the Fourth Estate. Now I fear it has taken over the other three
Another horror is the short clip on tonights news of children urging their parents to stop smoking lest they die from it. What a shocking abuse of children this is. What unneccessary terror it must subject some children to.
Is there no way of getting equal time and space in the papers for the rebuttal of all these false figures? Must we continue to live in a society where truth is ignored and unscientific falsehoods are spread about to further the agenda of a few single issue and anti libertarian bigots ?
Lyn -
Re:
"They obviously think that we are all as gullible and stupid as they are!"
The problem is, Lyn, that most of 'us' ARE.
And our Masters KNOW it !
Boy, do they know it..................
Norman -
Quite so !
The present generation of obedient little scribblers make the word 'hack' seem like a compliment.
And to think I once yearned to be one of their number..............
Two bloggers responses:
Fun with numbers: the smoking ban and heart attacks by Mark Wadsworth, 14 Sep 2009
…..making five by Mummylonglegs, 14 Sep 2009.
Read this as a 'follow on' from my comment on the prevous post re 'children - parents'.
Perhaps we should not worry about the newspaper publication of 'research findings' re heart attacks per se. Perhaps even the newspaper reports about the NHS 'hard-hitting campaign' should be ingored. What is really, really important is the this campaign should not be allowed to accur. We do not want our children to be used by the state to further its bent and twisted ends. We do not want the trust of our children to be abused. We do not want our right to private family life to be interferred with.
If this campaign goes ahead, we must shout and shout.
All complete tosh, of course.
However, an ALERT journalist would have put the obvious question - by way of a corollary:
If there had been a 10% RISE in the number of heart attacks etc, would THAT, too, have been attributable to the Ban ?
If not, why not ?
A confession from ASH UK
Correction: Heart attacks plummet after smoking ban, ASH Daily News 14th September 2009
We have heard that the figures reported in the Sunday Times yesterday (and now circulating elsewhere) are not based on any research conducted to date.
The impact of the smokefree legislation on heart attacks is being analysed by Anna Gilmore and team at Bath but they have no final results yet.
Their findings will be available next year in time for the three year review of the legislation
http://www.ash.org.uk/ash_al7qkeuw.htm#7791
How long does it take to "analyse" one web page?
No final results for England yet but Gilmore is quoted in the Sunday Times as saying, “There is already overwhelming evidence that reducing people’s exposure to cigarette smoke reduces hospital admissions due to heart attacks,” What is this overwhelming evidence?. It is certainly not the official haerat attack figures. These people are no more than common criminals and it is our money they are using to fund the lies they tell us.
Presumably ASH will be taking out full page ads in the national and Sunday papers admitting that the 10% figure was made up B*llocks?
I hadn't seen the Sunday Times article but had dinner with a doctor friend last night, a highly intelligent man and an ex-smoker himself. I was sounding off about the ban (no change there then) and he said, "Apparently it has brought about a 10% drop in MIs".
I promised him faithfully that this would be yet another round of junk science reporting, but nevertheless I was left feeling extremely depressed ... that if someone like my friend could be bamboozled so easily, what hope is there for the rest of Joe Public?
From the ASH website.
'Correction: Heart attacks plummet after smoking ban, ASH Daily News 14th September 2009
We have heard that the figures reported in the Sunday Times yesterday (and now circulating elsewhere) are not based on any research conducted to date.
The impact of the smokefree legislation on heart attacks is being analysed by Anna Gilmore and team at Bath but they have no final results yet.
Their findings will be available next year in time for the three year review of the legislation'.
Speaks for itself!
What's the betting Team Smokefree will have magic'd up an even bigger more headline-friendly number in time for publication? ""Smoking ban saves more lives than previously thought" declares boffin".
Dave -
Many thanks for the above post. Most interesting !
Just ONE excerpt, ie:
"They conducted research into 217,023 heart attack admissions 2 million heart attack deaths in 468 counties and 50 states of the United States over an 8 year period....."
SHOULD be enough to silence the Antis.
And let us also bear in mind that the States has one of the 'WORST' lung cancer death rates among smokers in the West.
I mean, how much MORE 'conclusive' can you get ?
I haven't yet replied to Little Chloe (school hols, and all that), but when I do, I'll pop your piece in - and demand a PROPER response this time.
She can bloody well start to EARN the money we pay her and her chums.
It seems the story has also gone local http://www.thisislincolnshire.co.uk/news/Heart-attack-rate-falls-thanks-smoking-ban/article-1340417-detail/article.html
... anyone got any energy to comment further? I've left a couple of comments but I'm not sure they got through because you have to register first. There are also more related articles on the site probably because Gillian Merron is Lincoln's MP and public health minister. She seems to run the paper these days!
Well, Pat,
I looked at this linconshire thing and found nothing but adverts.
I think that I will give it a miss.
I just tried the link, Junican, and it is there, no ads, although there aren't many comments so maybe people are wise to the fraud of these statistics - apart from those, of course, who love to see their prejudices confirmed by such "evidence".
A legendary example of sloppy journalism from my youth: 'Bang Bang, three shots rang out'.