| Forces International | HELICOBACTER PYLORI:
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| Forces International | HELICOBACTER PYLORI:
|
Back to main page |
Helicobacter pylori is stop-the-presses, front-page headline news for smokers, and a
disaster in the making for the anti-smoking movement. It is a bacterial infection of the
stomach lining beneath the gastric mucosa. The National Institutes of Health (NIH)
1994 Consensus Statement declared that most ulcers are caused by H pylori. The International
Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) now considers HP a major cause of stomach cancer.
H pylori is also linked to primary gastric lymphoma  (Bayerdorffer E, et al. Lancet 1995 Jun
24;345(8965):1591-1594), and to acne rosacea (Parish LC, Witkowski JA. Int J Dermatology
1995 Apr;34(4):236-237). H pylori infection is more common in the
lower socioeconomic class in developed countries. Nearly all of those infected acquired it
in very early childhood, before they were smokers, which invalidates speculations that
smoking increases susceptibility to it. Smokers are more likely to be in the lower
socioeconomic classes, and thus are more likely to be infected, and to suffer from
HP-associated diseases. The anti-smoking movement exploited this association for 30 years
to falsely attribute diseases to smoking which were actually caused by Helicobacter
pylori. Ulcers and stomach cancer have been quietly removed from the Center for Disease
Control's SAMMEC v 2.1 computer program, which is used to calculate so-called
"Smoking Attributable Mortality, Morbidity, and Economic
Cost." There has been no publicity about this, to keep the public believing
that smoking is to blame, and to protect the illusion that anti-smoker epidemiology is
infallible. No state-of-the-art reviews attribute any proportion of either disease to
smoking, the smoking variable has fallen from use, and DY Graham recently
wrote, "Factors previously used to predict ulcer recurrence such as smoking,...
are no longer important. The new dictum is `no H pylori, no ulcer.'" In the most exciting development of all, H pylori has been linked to heart disease.
Most research in this direction has been done in the UK. The US heart disease
establishment is stonewalling the subject. There has been no mention of this in US
journals. The anti-smoker establishment must be scared out of their wits that the same
fate awaits their smoking/heart disease claims as befell ulcers and stomach cancer. And,
while the loss of ulcers and stomach cancer had little effect on their
smoking-attributable disease claims, the loss of heart disease could reduce it by over
half. It also destroys their claim of 50,000 supposed passive smoking heart disease deaths,
because non-smokers exposed to smokers are more likely to be from the lower class, and
thus are more likely to be HP positive than upper class non-smokers. And, of course,
if direct smoking is not implicated, so-called passive smoking has no chance of being
blamed -- the dose makes the poison, afterall. New health effects of HP infection continue to be discovered, such as reduced growth
spurt in children, which jeopardize alleged ETS harms The stored serum collected in a large heart disease prospective, the Honolulu Heart Plan, provided confirmation of the HP-stomach cancer association. They may have even now completed an analysis of the HP-heart disease association which has not yet been published, and the anti-smokers may know of the sensational results. Heart disease is a major cause of death. Diverting funds to studies pre-designed
to "prove" that smoking is a cause when other, far more powerful factors have
been identified is a corruption of both science and morality. Courtesy of Carol Thompson
08/23/93 |
