This isn’t about the customers. It’s about the workers:
TORONTO (Reuters) - A Canadian anti-smoking campaigner who contracted lung cancer from second-hand smoke after years as a waitress has died, Ontario’s Heart and Stroke Foundation said on Tuesday.
Heather Crowe, 61, became a public icon after winning a landmark 2002 labor compensation case by arguing that she contracted the disease from inhaling second hand smoke during her 40-year career as a waitress.
An ardent non-smoker, she appeared in national television advertisements and inspired a government sponsored award in her name. In one ad Crowe declared: “People shouldn’t have to go to work to die.”
We are about to put a total indoor public smoking ban before the Municipal Assembly here in Anchorage. It is totally about workers rights. Cancer should never have to be part of your job description.
Of course, there will always be those who say that those workers could always choose to work elswhere. Because, you know, there are so many jobs going around these days.
Of the 30 studies on spousal smoking referred to in the EPA report, only 6 found any statistically significant association between ETS and cancer in nonsmokers married to smokers, and none found a strong relative risk. The studies actually used by the EPA were limited to 11 studies done in the United States. Using the EPA’s own Guidelines for Carcenogenic Risk Assessment, none of these showed a statistically significant risk. These guidelines call for a 95% Confidence Interval. By lowering it to 90%, only one of the 11 studies showed a statistically significant risk. More importantly, the two largest and most recent studies, one of which was partially funded by the National Cancer Institute, were omitted from consideration altogether. Had these two been included, no statistically significant risk would have been found even after lowering the Confidence Interval to 90%. Even after violating its own guidelines, in other words, the EPA could still show no statistically significant risk without selecting data to fit its hypothesis. This cooked data is the EPA’s only basis for declaring ETS to be a “Group A” carcinogen. (”Group A”, incidentally, does not mean “extra deadly”. It simply means “human”.)
One of the largest and most recent studies of ETS is the Brownson study, partially funded by the National Cancer Institute. This study found odds ratios varying from .7 in non-smoking spouses of smokers exposed for fewer than 40 years, to 1.3 in those exposed for over 40 years. .7 is a negative correlation, meaning that those exposed to ETS for less than 40 years experienced fewer cancers than the control group. Since the implication that ETS actually protected those subjects from cancer is biologically implausible, the only other conclusion that can be drawn is that the study’s margin of error, caused by random variation, is .3 or higher. This means that the 1.3 figure is equally suspect. The total risk for all groups averages out to exactly 1, or no risk at all.
http://joedawson.org/Interests/SmokersRights/Essays/issues1.html