SHS is safe according to OSHA,EPA,DOT,and etc. All govt bodies, not a tobacco company anywhere.


http://www.forces.org/writers/kjono/pdf/summary-16-points.doc


Genuine medical risks from Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS) at any level of exposure above “Zero Tolerance” has been flatly rejected by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

Recent U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data confirms OSHA’s statement regarding ETS exposure – and hence the absence of bona fide material risk from ETS.
The December 1992 EPA report on secondhand smoke confirms OSHA’s view that there is a safe Permissible Exposure Level (PEL) for Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS) constituents.
OSHA’s conclusions about Environmental Tobacco Smoke exposures, as well as many studies, directly refute anti-tobacco activists’ claims concerning the ETS dose absorbed by workers in the hospitality trade.
In its December 14, 2001 press release, “OSHA Withdraws Indoor Air Proposal With Support Of Anti-Smoking Groups” , OSHA said, in part:

“Assistant Secretary for Occupational Safety and Health John Henshaw announced that OSHA is withdrawing an inactive indoor air quality regulation proposed in 1994. The decision was reached with the support of major anti-smoking public health groups including the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, the American Lung Association, Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.”

The major anti-smoking groups supported OSHA because, if OSHA had regulations with safe PEL’s for SHS, there would have been no chance of getting states to pass the statewide smoking bans that have since been enacted.

In February 2003 OSHA went one step further beyond merely withdrawing regulations that included a nationwide smoking ban and clearly restated its position regarding Environmental Tobacco Smoke. Current federal OSHA policy, as stated in its February 24, 2003 “Reiteration Of Existing OSHA Policy In Indoor Air Quality,” is:

“Although OSHA has no regulation that addresses tobacco smoke as a whole, 29 CFR 1910.1000 Air contaminants, limits employee exposure to several of the main chemical components found in tobacco smoke. In normal situations, exposures would not exceed these permissible exposure limits (PELs), and, as a matter of prosecutorial discretion, OSHA will not apply the General Duty Clause to ETS.”

OSHA’s conclusions about ETS exposure are confirmed in results of studies as far back as 1975 and 1989. Two important studies are noted. The first study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1975. The second is a study by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) in 1989.
a.) As is evident from actual exposure levels recorded in the 2003 Australian study, hospitality workers are exposed to environments that result in the ingestion of far less than one cigarette per day. This observation is confirmed by Professor Emeritus Melvin First in a May 2003 letter to The Wall Street Journal, addressing 1975 tobacco smoke exposure levels. In his letter to the Wall Street Journal Prof. First said:

“In regard to your May 16 story “Passive Smoke Doesn’t Kill – Or Does It?”: James Enstroms’s finding that exposure to environmental smoke cannot be associated with increased risk of cancer and heart disease comes as no surprise to me as I authored, with a colleague, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (292:844-845, 1975) detailing the results of inconspicuous air samplings at restaurants, cocktail lounges, transportation terminals, etc. ‘to evaluate the health implications for non-smokers’ and found that the concentrations of tobacco smoke were equivalent to smoking about .004 cigarettes per hour while in these facilities. . . . smoking in public places was normal and prevalent a quarter century ago.”

It is apparent that 0.004 cigarettes per hour according to Dr. First equals 0.032 cigarettes per eight hour day. Airline exposures are documented by DOT to be about .009 cigarette equivalents in 8 hours, while sitting in the smoking section. The Australian study measured 143 micrograms in bar smoking sections, the equivalent of .09 cigarettes in 8 hours, where (as quoted below) the EPA said in its December 1992 report on Environmental Tobacco Smoke that “a range of 0.1 to 1.0 cigarettes per day for ETS exposure. . . . may be neglected because it has no major effect on lung cancer incidence.”

The December 1992 EPA report on secondhand smoke confirms OSHA’s view that there is a safe Permissible Exposure Level (PEL) for Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS) constituents. The 1992 EPA report clearly establishes that there is a known safe level of exposure to Environmental Tobacco Smoke and that report also established that material risk is directly associated with the dose absorbed. See EPACITES.PDF for copies of pages from the EPA report that include the below three quotes:
a.) Page 6-6 of that EPA report says:

“Citing cigarette equivalents calculated in other sources, Vutuc (1984) assumes a range of 0.1 to 1.0 cigarettes per day for ETS exposure. . . . Relative risks for smokers of 0.1 to 1.0 cigarettes per day give a range in relative risk from 1.03 to 1.36. The author concludes that ‘as it applies to passive smokers, this range of exposures may be neglected because it has no major effect on lung cancer incidence.” (Underline, italic added.)

b.) On page 6-9 that EPA report says:

“. . . the excess risk of lung cancer in nonsmokers exposed to ETS is clearly related to the dose absorbed.”

c.) The December 1992 EPA report on secondhand smoke also confirms lung cancer risks from other sources that have risk factors higher than ETS. For example, page 5-54 says:

“Cooking with oil was examined by GAO and WUWI, both in China, with positive associations for deep frying (OR ranges of 1.5 – 1.9 and 1.2 – 2.1, respectively, both increasing in frequency of cooking with oil.)”



Tobacco control advocates boldly assert a hyper-inflated “cigarette equivalent” to buttress demands for a statewide hospitality venue smoking ban in Illinois.


OSHA’s conclusions about Environmental Tobacco Smoke exposures, as well as many studies, directly refute anti-tobacco activists’ claims concerning the ETS dose absorbed by workers in the hospitality trade. For example, in 2004 the Snohomish Health District published a cigarette-equivalent “fact” on its Web site, “If you are in a smoky bar or room for two hours it is as if you’ve smoked 4 cigarettes,” which is the equivalent of 16 cigarettes in 8 hours.
The Snohomish Health Department’s alleged cigarette-equivalent level of 16 cigarettes per 8 hour day is 500 times greater than that reported by Dr. First, 2,000 times greater than airline measurements by DOT, and 178 times greater than actual exposure measured in 17 Australian bars, environments where ventilation code generally requires 2 air exchanges per hour. Most US venues have an air exchange rate of 10 per hour.
Based on authoritative information about actual ETS exposures such “estimates” are wildly and irresponsibly inflated.

So let's take the worst-case scenario; the EPA saying that a nonsmoker gets 1 cigarette's worth of exposure per day. That's 1/20 of a pack. It would therefore take 20 times longer for a nonsmoker to ingest the same amount of smoke into his/her body as it would a direct smoker who consumes a pack a day, and THAT's assuming that the nonsmoker spends 24/7 with the smoker. It takes DECADES for a direct smoker to have a 1 in 11 chance of developing lung cancer. It also takes decades to develop heart disease, if ever, from direct smoking. My whole point is that the same exposure to a nonsmoker would require CENTURIES. WHY, oh, WHY, can't people GET this?????????? Smoking bans are not "protecting" ANYBODY.

The antis don't give a rat's ass about the science, or lack thereof, anymore when they push for smoking bans. Its all about denormalization and making smoking socially unacceptable. They still may quote the SG's report or some other BS studies from Jim Repace to pass on to the media - but when it comes time to talking with the lawmakers, they don't try to hide their social engineering agenda anymore - this is what seems to be happening here in Virginia where they're trying to get the governor to amend a law passed by the assembly where restaurants would have to post a "smoking permitted" sign if they allow smoking into a total statewide ban. And its happening with the outdoor bans we're seeing in a few California towns too - the American Cancer Society even said that regardless of whether or not outdoor secondhand smoke is a health risk, if it discourages smoking, they're in favor of it. Whether or not this is all because they realize that SHS is indeed a bogus premise for smoking bans or that nobody cares about the right to smoke anymore and they can finally be honest about their motives is anyones' guess.

quote:

Originally posted by Pat:
So let's take the worst-case scenario; the EPA saying that a nonsmoker gets 1 cigarette's worth of exposure per day. That's 1/20 of a pack. It would therefore take 20 times longer for a nonsmoker to ingest the same amount of smoke into his/her body as it would a direct smoker who consumes a pack a day, and THAT's assuming that the nonsmoker spends 24/7 with the smoker. It takes DECADES for a direct smoker to have a 1 in 11 chance of developing lung cancer. It also takes decades to develop heart disease, if ever, from direct smoking. My whole point is that the same exposure to a nonsmoker would require CENTURIES. WHY, oh, WHY, can't people GET this?????????? Smoking bans are not "protecting" ANYBODY.

Some more interesting facts about why we should not worry about the so-called risks of smoking.

http://www.forces.org/writers/hatton/files/murder.htm

What about heart disease, then? It's on the cigarette packet in capital letters: SMOKING CAUSES HEART DISEASE. The most authoritative study on this is certainly the Framingham Heart Study, which is known as the Rolls Royce of studies. In this town in Massachusetts, 5,127 men and women have been studied since 1948. They have had the fullest details taken on their health and life-style, and have been checked every two years. Dr. Seltzer of Harvard University discusses this study at length in 'Framingham Study Data and "Established Wisdom" abut Cigarette Smoking and Coronary Heart Disease', Journal of Critical Epidemiology 42, no. 8 (1989).

The results of the study show that there is no relationship between smoking and heart disease in women except a very slight favorable one (women who smoke have a very slightly lower rate of angina, not statistically significant).

For men, the relative risk starts at 1.3 in smokers of forty or more cigarettes a day. Remember, the risk ratio of 2 has been designated the lower boundary of a weak association, so this means in fact a non-significant association. This risk went down to exactly one, that is, no risk at all, as the subjects aged.

When information about certain of the other 300 risk factors for heart disease were taken into account, the relationship between smoking and heart disease was lost. Dr. Seltzer asks: 'What use did the Surgeon General's Report in 1983 make of these results?' and quotes the report as follows:
It starts by declaring that 'cigarette smoking is a major cause of heart disease (CHD) in the US for both men and women.
1. In men, the incidence of CHD is two folds greater in cigarette smokers than in non-smokers and fourfold greater in heavy smokers
2. In women, the rates of CHD are lower than in men but are commensurately higher when the smoking patterns are similar to those in men.
3. The risk of developing CHD increases with the duration (in years) of cigarette smoking.
4. The cessation of smoking leads to CHD death rates that are substantially lower in the stopped smokers than are in the continuing smokers, and after 10 years of non-smoking, the CHD incidence of former light smokers approximates those of non-smokers.'

One can only admire such a creative usage of statistics and epidemiology.

(Added by me.)
Those ” no excess risk for smokers” findings are further validated by this study done from the same data group.

LIFE TIME RISK OF CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE(CVD)
Prediction of Lifetime Risk for Cardiovascular Disease by Risk Factor Burden at 50 Years of Age

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute funded the study.

This study was published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association;Vol.113,Issue 6,February 14,2006.



Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine
February 7, 2006

Heart Disease Prevention Should Start Before Middle Age
CHICAGO—If you think you’re too young to worry about heart disease or stroke—think again. Efforts to prevent America’s No. 1 and No. 3 killers should begin long before you’re middle-aged, according to a study in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
The study, the first to estimate the overall lifetime risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD), found that more than half of men and nearly 40 percent of women in the United States will develop CVD during their lifetime.
At age 50, the average lifetime risk of developing CVD before age 95 is 52 percent for men and 39 percent for women. But the most striking finding was the high risk linked with having several major risk factors at age 50. Diabetes conferred the highest CVD risks.
Although Dr. Lloyd-Jones and colleagues derived the risk estimates from nearly 8,000 50-year-olds, the risk profiles are applicable to younger Americans too.
According to Elizabeth G. Nabel, MD, director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, “These new data underscore the value of prevention in the battle against heart disease. Preventing the development of risk factors like overweight, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes at younger ages can help you live healthier much longer.”
The researchers reviewed the medical records of 3,564 men and 4,362 women participants in the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s Framingham Heart Study, all of whom were free of CVD at age 50. They then determined which men and women suffered atherosclerotic CVD problems in subsequent years, including heart attacks, coronary insufficiency, angina pectoris, strokes that result from a blocked artery, and death from coronary heart disease or other CVD ailments. They also calculated the impact of modifiable risk factors such as weight and smoking.

Finally, smokers and nonsmokers showed similar lifetime CVD risk. ( now,on with the original article)

But surely, you may say, this question could be settled easily enough. With all these studies being done, couldn't someone do an 'intervention trial', as described in Science without Sense, comparing two groups of smoking and non-smoking people. The answer is that this has indeed been done. There have been a number of studies that have done something like that. But you've never heard of them? When you hear about the results obtained you will see why.

There has been only one that has solely dealt with smoking. This was the first 'Whitehall' study, starting in 1968, which recruited 1,445 British civil servants.
Half were encouraged to give up smoking, the others were left alone. After a year smoking in the intervention group (the nagged) was down by 75%. After ten years, 17.2% of this group was dead, as against 17.5% of the control group. This difference of percentage is not statistically significant.

There was no difference in deaths from lung cancer or heart disease, and the only other unexpected result was that the intervention group had 28 deaths from cancer other than lung cancer, compared with the control in which the number of deaths from such cancers was 12. This is statistically significant.

Another study, with a wider range, was the 'Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial' (MRFIT) in the US. In this there were 12,866 subjects. They were all shown to be at risk of heart disease because of their lifestyle and general health. (With 300 risk factors that's not surprising.) One group was given drugs for high blood pressure, encouraged to eat more healthily, and to stop smoking. The other was left alone, as in the Whitehall study.

These were not self-selected studies, and seem to have been conducted competently. At the end of the MRFIT study, 41.2 per thousand of the 'healthy' group were dead, as against the 40.4 per thousand of the other.
Scientists investigating the study didn't like the results, and went over them again. They found that the drugs to reduce high blood pressure had in fact increased the death rate among the men given them, and were forced to conclude that the risk factors had nothing to do with the actual risks.
Professor Burch, in a letter to the British Medical Journal (March 1985) pointed out that in these two studies:
In the low smoking intervention groups 56 cases of lung cancer were recorded in a total starting population of 7,142 men (0.78%); the corresponding number for the more heavily smoking normal care groups being 53 in 7,169 (0.74%).
Findings for cancer other than those of the lung were even more surprising.
Some 88 cases (1.23%) were recorded in the low smoking intervention groups, but only 60 cases (0.84%) in the normal care groups. Thus in the category 'all cancers' there were 144 cases (2.02%) in the intervention groups but 113 cases (1.58%) in the more heavily smoking normal care groups. Reduced levels of smoking were associated with increases in cancer incidence.
He concludes:
It is fair to ask experts to explain why these remarkable findings from methodologically reputable trials conflict so drastically with their claims.

Professor Burch adds, in Can Epidemiology Become a Rigorous Science?
Strenuous efforts have been made to rescue something from the wreckage, though Stallones risked the creation of many personal enemies when he wrote: 'No amount of squirming on the hook alters the fact that for every 1,000 test subjects 41.2 dies and for every 1,000 control subjects 40.4 died.'

Squirming on the hook
The Finnish businessmen's study in the 1980s took 612 48-year-old businessmen and got them to do what was done in MRFIT: change their diet, give up smoking, and take various drugs to reduce blood pressure. They also made them take more exercise.
The control group was of 610 similar men, all 48-year-old businessmen with as far as possible similar habits and life-styles. This is what is called 'randomization'. It doesn't sound random: in essence it means that the subjects and the controls are chosen from similar people by the investigators; unlike the self-selected smokers and non-smokers in the Hill & Doll study.
After the allotted period of 15 years, it was found that the healthy-livers had totted up 67 deaths, and the others only 46. There was no squirming on the hook about this because it was ignored. And that is the method now used with any evidence that conflicts with the accepted version. The deadly effects of smoking have now entered folklore. There is no need for the medicine men to debate anything.