“There is no good data showing secondhand smoke kills people.”
— John Stossel on during an interview Dec. 4 on “Fox and Friends”
All those warnings you heard about secondhand smoke from your mother, federal government PSAs and school D.A.R.E. instructors? Bogus, a Fox Business host claimed recently.
In a discussion about waning personal freedom in the free world, pundit John Stossel went off about the onslaught of government rules and regulations telling Americans what they can do and when, where and how they can do it.
He used cigarette smoking as an example, saying that business owners should have the right to allow smoking in their bars or restaurants even where ordinances or laws ban the practice.
“Yeah, they kill smokers,” Stossel said on “Fox & Friends” of cigarettes. “But there is no good data showing secondhand smoke kills people.”
A Fox spokeswoman did not return our inquiry, and Stossel, who has long questioned the lethal nature of secondhand smoke, did not reply to emails and tweets.
Stossel’s definition of “good” might be different than ours, but there is plenty of scientific research and consensus that secondhand smoke does indeed kill people.
Secondhand smoke is a mixture of smoke emitted from the burning end of a cigarette or other tobacco products and what’s exhaled by smokers.
The government has campaigned for tough anti-smoking policies in public places and workplaces as a way to protect Americans from secondhand smoke, saying there is no safe level of exposure.
The U.S. surgeon general has released 31 reports about the effects of smoking since 1964.
Consensus on secondhand smoke really began to form in the 1980s, even as the tobacco industry’s”doubt-creation machine” spun opposing talking points, said Dr. Jonathan Samet, senior scientific editor of the 2014 surgeon general report and director of the University of Southern California’s Institute for Global Health.
The surgeon general’s 2006 report stated rather bluntly that inhaling secondhand smoke “causes lung cancer and coronary heart disease in nonsmoking adults.” Involuntary exposure to tobacco smoke killed more than 49,000 nonsmokers in 2005, plus 430 newborns who died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, the report said.
Secondhand smoke can also increase risk of stroke, the new report found. Beyond that, involuntary exposure poses significant problems for children, worsening asthma and leading to other respiratory conditions.
Since 1964, a recent report said, 2.46 million nonsmokers have died from exposure to secondhand smoke.
Scientists don’t keep a count of deaths by secondhand smoke as recorded in death certificates. Instead, they rely on statistical methods used by epidemiologists, who are experts in disease patterns within populations. To figure out lung cancer deaths from secondhand smoke, the individual risk of lung cancer is analyzed next to the proportion of people exposed to secondhand smoke.
It’s a complicated statistical analysis, one with which Stossel obviously finds fault. But it’s not unusual. The same method is used to attribute the number of deaths from obesity through diabetes.
The surgeon general is not alone in major scientific organizations linking secondhand smoke with deadly diseases. There’s also the World Health Organization’s International Center for Research on Cancer, the Environmental Protection Agency, the American Cancer Society and the National Academy of Sciences.
You can quibble over specific numbers since they’re approximations, said Gary Giovino, a professor of health behavior at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. But not that secondhand smoke kills, he said.
How do folks such as Stossel respond?
The libertarian Cato Institute published a response to the 2006 surgeon general’s report on secondhand smoke that highlighted testimony before a committee of the British Parliament by Oxford epidemiologist Richard Peto. Peto, who has studied the causes of cancer and the effects of smoking, testified that he could not quantify deaths from secondhand smoke because “these hazards cannot be directly measured.” (The story was written by Gio Gori, an epidemiologist who wrote publications on behalf of the industry-backed Tobacco Institute disputing studies about nicotine’s harmful effects.)
Conversely, some scientists say the government is actually undercounting secondhand smoke-related deaths.
Our ruling
Stossel said “there is no good data showing secondhand smoke kills people.”
His definition of good obviously differs with the vast majority of scientists and researchers studying the effects of secondhand smoke. They say the data does show that secondhand smoke kills people.
We rated Stossel’s claim False.
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