A large-scale academic study has found no clear link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer, undercutting the premise of years of litigation including a Florida case that yielded a $350 million settlement.
The article in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute details a study of 76,000 women over more than a decade. Lung cancer was 13 times more common in current smokers, and four times more common in former smoker.
But the study found no statistically significant relationship between lung cancer and exposure to passive smoke, debunking a classic anti-smoking trope, and effectively undermining the primary rationale behind pub, bar, and public smoking bans implemented around the world.
Only among women who had lived with a smoker for 30 years or more was there a relationship that the researchers described as “borderline statistical significance.” Blogger Christopher Snowden notes “there’s no such thing as borderline statistical significance. It’s either significant or it’s not.”
However, one researcher in the article continued to argue for smoking bans, claiming that the most important effect of indoor-smoking bans may be on smokers.
“The strongest reason to avoid passive cigarette smoke is to change societal behavior: to not live in a society where smoking is a norm,” said Dr. Jyoti Patel of Northwestern University School of Medicine.
While previous cancer studies have had mixed results, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still calculate secondhand smoke is responsible for 46,000 heart disease deaths and 3,400 deaths from cancer a year. The problem with these previous studies however is that many show the strongest association between secondhand smoke and cancer in case-control studies that can suffer from “recall bias,” or the tendency of people with a disease that can be blamed on a past exposure t0 be more likely to recall it.
The study goes a long way toward eliminating the premise of a groundbreaking lawsuit on behalf of 60,000 flight attendants who sought damages for lung cancer from passive smoke that was common back in the days when you could light up in an airliner.
Tobacco companies settled that by paying $300 million to establish the Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute (FAMRI), to support research into tobacco-related diseases. Lawyers for flight attendants have been battling to have FAMRI shut down and the proceeds paid directly to flight attendants, saying the elimination of smoking on airliners has ended its usefulness to the class.
Original reporting from Forbes.com
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