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The Evidence

The scientific Archive that debunks 50 years of superstitions on smoking


 
 

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Passive smoke: here is the list of all the studies updated to 2006: no dangers

... And they call this science!
THE QUESTIONNAIRES OF THE EPIDEMIOLOGICAL FRAUD

The long list of the methodological errors in the junk science of passive smoke
The US Federal Court decision on the EPA fraud on passive smoke Downloadable list of all base studies on lung cancer and cardiovascular disease, including financing sources

Related links

PROLOGUE The long list of methodological errors in the junk science of passive smoke The questionnaires of the epidemiological fraud Downloadable list of all base studies on lung cancer and cardiovascular disease, including financing sources
Educate everyone! Download the questionnaire in PDF format and give it to your family, relatives, friends and acquaintances... to everyone, that is, who is convinced that the smoker hurts the nonsmoker with his passive smoke because the health authorities say that science has demonstrated it. Show them what kind of "science" laws that ban smoking in "public" places are based on  - and what passes for credibility in public health today.

Jump to preface || Jump to contextual observations || Jump directly to the questionnaire

You must believe smoking kills. You must believe that passive smoke kills as well. This is the imperative - no matter the cost, no matter the means, fraud, intimidation or fear - even if it takes to stifle scientific inquiry.  Journalists and newspapers giving voice to those who denounce the Great Fraud perpetrated by international "Public Health" must be admonished, intimidated or silenced. It must be proclaimed that "science" says that smoking -  even passive smoke - kills. You must never debate with those who can demonstrate otherwise. You must accept, submit - and obey.

This document, published by FORCES, repudiates the anti-tobacco orthodoxy by exposing the cruel joke foisted on the entire world by the anti-tobacco establishment. Reproduced herein is the questionnaire devised by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, agency of the World Health Organization, to fabricate "studies" on passive smoke. This questionnaire is at the base of the Multicenter Case–Control Study of Exposure to Environmental Tobacco Smoke and Lung Cancer in Europe of 1998 which, by the way, turned out to be negative on the "dangers" of passive smoke. This questionnaire represents the typical model (perhaps the best one) on which ALL the studies that fabricate risk and statistical death from ETS are based. 

Understandable to all because IT IS NOT SCIENCE, the questionnaire merely records vague memories, then converts them into numbers with intimidating mathematical formulas that are not necessary to understand because the data entered are, you shall see, unquantifiable statistical trash. Peruse it yourself after first reading the preface and the contextual observations - to better appreciate the incompetence and the lack of professional ethics of the world  "health authorities" when they proclaim that secondhand smoke "poisons others." More than any other scientific discussion or discourse on freedom or the economy, this document should open our eyes because it is self-explanatory. Note well that the very similar methodology is used for the production of a great number of other health scares diverting billions of public dollars to devising and enforcing restrictions, useless laws and regulations.  We should ask ourselves what are the consequences when the political forces turn the other way as this fraudulent "science" is exposed.

PREFACE

The divisiveness instigated between nonsmokers and smokers comes from the fear of being hurt by the "emissions" of the smoker. This fear has its basis in years of relentless campaigns and in the words of authorities stating that scientific studies have demonstrated that passive smoke damages the health of the nonsmoker. We all have heard of the trite "mountain of evidence" against passive smoke now and then. Well, here it is: hundreds of studies done with the same (or worse) methodology as this. In reality, the world public is the victim of one of the greatest statistical frauds that ever existed, a methodological fraud where insignificant results are falsely represented by the health authorities as if they were scientific proof. The enormous social cost of this fraud can be easily quantified by public budgets, loss of profits by industries and businesses and, most importantly, the negative consequential for employment and productivity.

To defeat this fraud in a society that, unfortunately, considers the perception of physical health to be of far greater value than personal freedom, it is important to demonstrate inarguably that the dangers anti-smoking campaigns tout are baseless, and to educate the public on how such fraud is endorsed and perpetrated at the highest level of authority.

One very important thing to notice is that the studies and the questionnaire simply talk about exposure to passive smoke, but not about the far more important question concerning the REAL DOSE of passive smoke the subjects of the studies have inhaled. It is clear that the dose is the real factor to be used for a reliable analysis of possible risks. Now try to imagine how impossible it is to measure the dose when the exposure itself is simply an illusory conjecture!

When we hear about scientific studies, people imagine scientists at work; dissecting cells, handling test tubes and peering into microscopes while following the rigorous discipline of science to arrive at the most true and objective results possible.  Nothing is falser for what passes as science concerning passive smoke. Happy reading and bitter laughing!

CONTEXTUAL OBSERVATIONS

Before reading this questionnaire it is necessary to put briefly the document into context.  The questions are asked to nonsmokers with lung cancer (cases) or to their offspring and relatives. The same questions are asked to a comparison group of nonsmokers (controls) who do not have lung cancer.

It takes very little imagination to understand that:

  • Those affected by lung cancer know that their survival chances are few, and that the life that remains is usually short. It is only human that they try to find a reason to explain the disease. During the past 10-15 years, armed with huge amount of misinformation on smoking, doctors and patients have a ready-made diagnosis: if the patient smoked or was exposed to tobacco smoke, then smoking is the cause. People affected by lung cancer, therefore, have the natural tendency to inflate the memories of their exposure. With such a mental posture, there is an irreparable basic flaw from the statistical point of view: the absence of objectivity.

  • The same applies when offspring and relatives are interviewed, often years after the death of the patient. If the emotional ties with the diseased were strong, the need for an explanation that "makes sense" (and the search for a scapegoat) is also very strong. Once again, this makes the answers to the questions unreliable.

  • Social stigma, often veering towards contempt for smokers, regarding lung cancer created by years of relentless propaganda induces many of the interviewed to lie about whether they smoked in the past. In order to hide what they believe is the "real" cause of their disease, they represent themselves as nonsmokers and they explain their disease with exposure to passive smoke. This form of lie/error is called misclassification.

  • The binomial smoking/lung cancer has become the ideological/emotional/political basis of a way of thinking that is unchangeable and unarguable (perhaps just because it is not demonstrable!) of anti-smoking "science", thus the absolute postulation of studies and politics. Furthermore, it has been deeply lodged in our culture. But studies by definition should not have cultural, ideological, emotional or political bases if they were truly scientific. Today, however, these "studies" do not intend to establish whether passive smoke is damaging - as that has become a false notion taken for granted. Their purpose is just to establish how much passive smoke is dangerous. One therefore can easily imagine the bias when the interviewers solicit the desired answers, when they reduce to numbers the answers of the subjects, and finally when the researchers interpret the results.

  • Often (too often) those who finance the studies are entities that have a strong political and economic interest that the studies produce the "right" results, namely condemning smoking as much as possible. It has reached the point where scientific journals, strongly influenced by pharmaceutical giants having an obvious anti-smoking interest, refuse to publish studies that are financed by the the tobacco industry. This is to prevent the circulation of information that could be contrary to the prescriptions of the social engineering that must be implemented. Furthermore those researchers and the scientific journals that do produce and publish the "wrong" results are burned at the stake of public opinion, as was the case of Enstrom and Kabat and of the British Medical Journal for their study Environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality in a prospective study of Californians, 1960-98. That enormous study, which lasted 40 years and examined 118,000 subjects, demonstrated conclusively that the "dangers" of passive cannot be measuredNearly the entire cost of the study, several million dollars, was funded by the California Dept. of Health and Human Services and the American Cancer Society. When it became clear that the conclusions reached by the study would not have produced the desired anti-smoking result, the original donors abruptly cut off the funding. Needing $75,000 to compile the data and bring the study to a close,  the two authors turned to the Center for Indoor Air Research, financed by the tobacco industry. Using the paltry tobacco financing as an excuse, ALL scientific journals refused to publish this important study, except the British Medical Journal, which was mercilessly castigated by anti-tobacco special interests.

  • ALL studies on passive smoke that compute risk and mortality invariably use this methodology to "measure" exposure to passive smoke. The questions may change a little, but not the system. With this methodology passive smoke has been statistically associated to all kinds of disease and not just lung cancer: cardiovascular disease; childhood tooth cavities; autism; a large number of types of cancer; gum recession; pneumonia; bronchitis; SIDS; leukemia; estrogen imbalances; otitis; colitis; psychiatric problems; and so on ad infinitum - the more the merrier.

In this social, mental and emotional context to the patient or his survivors the following questions are posed. In the tables and in blue are our comments.


 

Download the original version of the IARC/World Heath Organization questionnaire in PDF



Questionnaire on occasional smoking and
environmental tobacco smoke (ETS)
(Page 1)

Tobacco smoking

    Yes... 1; No... 2

1 or more cigarettes/day

or half a pack of cigarettes/week
or 2 or more packs/month
or 4 or more cigarillos/week
or 3 or more cigars/week
or 3 or more pipes/week

if YES to at least one of the questions, go to "Active smoking" section.
if NO, continue with the next question

  • Did you ever try to smoke
YES... NO...

What did you smoke?

 

Frequency

If yes, from what age did you smoke occasionally?

Cigarettes   If during this period you smoked mainly the same brand, indicate the brand
 (otherwise skip)
Per day............... 1
    Filter...................... 1 Per week............. 2
    Non filter............... 2 Per month........... 3
Cigar......................... 3 Per year.............. 4
Pipe.......................... 4 Per lifetime......... 5
Cigarette & pipe..... 5  
         
From  To  

How many?

.......................................

.......................................
.......................................

 

  • Did you inhale tobacco smoke?
 
  Not at all, only in the mouth....................... 1
  A little, just in the throat............................. 2
  Deeply into the lung.................................. 3

Questionnaire on occasional smoking and
environmental tobacco smoke (ETS)
(Page 2)

ETS during childhood and until subject left parents' home

Let's imagine we are children.  How is it possible to remember things with sufficient precision to express memories with a number?  Perform the following test:  recount how many times a week, when you were 10 years old, you were eating vegetables (equivalent to how much Dad and Mom were smoking) and also which vegetables (equivalent to cigarettes, cigars and pipes).  Never mind remembering what we ate one week ago!

If the subject is aware that one or both parents smoked since his/her birth, starting age = 0

  What did he/she smoke? Did he/she smoke in your presence?  
       
  Cigarettes....................... 1 Every day......................... 1  
  Cigars.............................. 2 Almost every day
(5-6 days/week)...............
2  
  Pipe.................................. 3 2-4 days/week.................. 3  
  Cigarettes & pipe............ 4 Rarely................................. 4  
  Don't remember............... 8 Never................................... 5  
  Non-smoker...................... 9      
Relationship     From age To age
         
Father
Mother
 

Please note that the numbers to which the questions above are reduced (as are all the questions in this questionnaire) are considered  EXACT representations of reality without margins of error, while actually they can be nothing but illusory conjectures.

...................................
...................................
...................................
 

In our examples of vegetables above, now try to remember what you were eating,  let's say 30 years ago, when a friend came to visit.

     

Would you say that the room was usually:

     

Frequency

Very smoky..........................................................
(you could see clouds of smoke in the air)
1
From age To age

How many hours in a room with tobacco smoke?

Per day........................
Per week.....................
Per month.....................
1
2
3
Fairly smoky........................................................
(you could see diffuse smoke in the air)
2
A little smoky.......................................................
(you could only smell the smoke)
3










 
 
 
 

From the table above it is possible to see the vagueness of the questions (very smoky, fairly smoky...) and thus the vagueness of the resulting answers. It's undeniable that when we try to recollect memories, precision is impossible.  These studies, however, are called SCIENTIFIC and the answers are then transformed into fully quantified deaths, types of disease and precise social costs.  Please also note that the data collected in this manner are then consolidated in ONE SINGLE RISK VALUE, without any mention of the vast margin of error which is inevitable in the original answers!


Questionnaire on occasional smoking and
environmental tobacco smoke (ETS)
(Page 3)

 

ETS from the spouse
the person with whom the subject lives/lived in a marital type relationship.

If the subject has been married more than once, start with the first marriage and add additional lines for the subsequent marriages.

 

If NO, go to next spouse or next page.

Two types of changes need probing:

  1. Change in spouse smoking habits:  Type of product amount smoked, change to non filter/filter.
  2. Change in subject's exposure to spouse: Moving house, spouse away from home.

Use more than one line when spouse smoked more than one tobacco product in the same period.
Start on first line with subject's age when he/she was first exposed.

 

     

Did he/she smoke in your presence?

   

For how many hours/day were you exposed to tobacco smoke from your spouse on average?

     

How many cigarettes (cigars, pipes) did he/she smoke in your presence on average?

 

What did he/she smoke?

   
   

How many cigarettes (cigars, pipes) did he/she smoke in your presence on average?

Every day................. 1
  Cigarettes.................1 Almost every day ....
(5-6 days/week)
2
Period Cigars.......................2 2-4 days/week ........ 3
  Pipe..........................3 Rarely....................... 4        
From age
(years)
To age
(years)
Cigarettes & Pipe...4 Never....................... 5 Weekdays Holidays weekends Weekdays Holidays weekends
                 

 

The comments stated before apply to the table above.  But this time we see the addition of distinction between weekdays and weekends!


Questionnaire on occasional smoking and
environmental tobacco smoke (ETS)
(Page 4)

ETS from other cohabitants
Smokers who lived with you in the same house or visited your house regularly, other than your spouse.

Use more than one line for subjects who smoked more than one tobacco product in the same period.

 

   

Did he/she smoke in your presence?

   

For how many hours/day were you exposed to tobacco smoke from him/her on average

   

How many cigarettes (cigars, pipes) did he/she smoke in your presence on average?

 

What did he/she smoke?

 
    Every day.................... 1
  Cigarettes................. 1 Almost every day.........
(5-6 days/week)
2
Period Cigars........................ 2 2-4 days/week ........... 3
  Pipe............................ 3 Rarely.......................... 4        
From
 age
(years)
To
 age
(years)
Cigarettes & pipe..... 4 Never........................... 5 Weekdays Holidays
Weekends
Weekdays Holidays
Weekends
               

 

THE PIRATES OF EVIDENCE.  The most appalling aspect about these questions is that those who construct and use them define these "measurement" instruments, as if they were spectroscopes, chromatographers or nephelometers! The virtual instruments then spit out meaningless figures that are distributed worldwide as scientifically valid.  Those who make such statements are ministers of health, the pinnacle of world public health, press, anti-cancer associations, anti-smoking activists, doctors and other "luminaries". Perhaps the most troubling point is that there are those who, in good faith and due to incompetence, believe they have reliable data!  But let's reassure ourselves: the vast majority of those who state that "passive smoke kills XX people per year" are just simple con men.


Questionnaire on occasional smoking and
environmental tobacco smoke (ETS)
(Page 5)

ETS in vehicles

If NO, go to the next page
If YES, please state from what age to what age, on which type of vehicle and for how many hours per day or per week you were exposed to tobacco smoke.

 

 

Type of vehicle

   

How many hours per day or week were you in this vehicle while you were exposed to smoke?

  Car.............................. 1
Period Train............................ 2
  Bus/Tram..................... 3  

Would you say that the vehicle was usually:

From
 age
(years)
To
 age
(years)
Other  (specify)........ 4 Per day Per week
Very smoky.................
Fairly smoky......
A little smoky................
1
2
3
             
..........................
..........................
..........................
..........................
..........................
..........................
..........................
..........................
..........................
..........................

Exposure already covered, e.g. occupational and from spouse should be excluded.  Exposure during daily commuting to work should be reported in this section.

Here the "measuring instruments" become even more grotesque.  How is it possible to remember how many hours one has been in a vehicle throughout the decades in the first place?  And what about exposure? In automobiles and buses, for example, doors are often opened and windows lowered; additionally, the air is artificially circulated (air-conditioning/heater).  Circulating the air often  "sucks in" the emissions of surrounding vehicles.  Here more than anywhere else the "fairly smoky" and the "a little smoky" can make one laugh - or cry.  But even these "data" will be transformed into exact and unchangeable numbers to be computed with the huge formulas discussed below.

 


Questionnaire on occasional smoking and
environmental tobacco smoke (ETS)
(Page 6)

ETS indoors
In places other than the home, work premises or vehicles e.g., restaurants, bars, pubs, cinemas, theatres, friends' homes, etc.

  Period    
   

How many hours per week were you exposed to tobacco smoke in this place?

Would you say that the place was usually:

Specify where exposure took place