The Stroud News and Journal has today run the story “Lung cancer awareness campaign comes to Stroud”.
The article highlights the Gloucestershire County Council (GCC) campaign and the importance of getting yourself checked out if you display symptoms of lung cancer such as a persistent cough and breathlessness.
What it fails to comment on however are the causes of lung cancer. 90% of cases of lung cancer in the UK are attributed to smoking.
Equally it also fails to mention the £12.2 million that GCC has invested in tobacco firms.
On the one hand GCC are funding campaigns to raise awareness of lung cancer and on the other they are pumping money into an industry that is responsible for 90% of cases of lung cancer…
When I raised this with local politicians it only seemed to be the local Conservative MP, Neil Carmichael, who didn’t think this was a problem!
Hynd's Blog 
In order to prove cause one must prove cause and since nobody can find proof of smoking caused diseases the tobacco companies are not liable!
JOINT STATEMENT ON THE RE-ASSESSMENT OF THE TOXICOLOGICAL TESTING OF TOBACCO PRODUCTS”
7 October, the COT meeting on 26 October and the COC meeting on 18
November 2004.
http://cot.food.gov.uk/pdfs/cotstatementtobacco0409
“5. The Committees commented that tobacco smoke was a highly complex chemical mixture and that the causative agents for smoke induced diseases (such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, effects on reproduction and on offspring) was unknown. The mechanisms by which tobacco induced adverse effects were not established. The best information related to tobacco smoke – induced lung cancer, but even in this instance a detailed mechanism was not available. The Committees therefore agreed that on the basis of current knowledge it would be very difficult to identify a toxicological testing strategy or a biomonitoring approach for use in volunteer studies with smokers where the end-points determined or biomarkers measured were predictive of the overall burden of tobacco-induced adverse disease.”
In other words … our first hand smoke theory is so lame we can’t even design a bogus lab experiment to prove it. In fact … we don’t even know how tobacco does all of the magical things we claim it does.
The greatest threat to the second hand theory is the weakness of the first hand theory.
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Hi John,
This is well outside my field of knowledge but Cancer Research UK do seem to quote quite a few peer reviewed papers in supporting their assertion that smoking is the single biggest cause of lung cancer (see http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/healthyliving/smokingandtobacco/howdoweknow/tobacco-smoking-and-cancer-the-evidence).
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I think you could send this as a letter to SNJ
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Will do
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