A NEW ARCADE FOR POLITICIANS: THE "CREATE YOUR OWN EPIDEMIC" GAME

roceeding with its plans to disseminate fear and junk science in the world, the WHO has just put on line a new game.

The commoner can play this interactive game, but it is actually targeted to a particular breed of people: politicians and political lobbyists.

The WHO wants the world to believe that smoking is a plague equal or greater than the Black Death of the 14th century, and that it is in progress at planetary level. This is achieved by entering wild guesses into statistical computers, and by using "tech-talk" and an arrogant, alarmistic, authoritative attitude to make it all "feel" real. Illustration: "The fourth horseman of the apocalypse" from Trés Riches Heures of Jean, Duc de Berry. Click on the image for a larger version

It is a mathematical model called "Economic Consequences of Smoking (ECOS)".

It should be called: Create your own epidemic.

"The aim of this model is to provide an interactive software tool, which will be widely accessible and applicable for use by health care payers, government policy makers and other health care organisations. It is hoped that one particular use of this model will be in the promotion of smoking cessation, as well as providing an overview of the burden of smoking-related disease across a number of countries. The countries included in this particular version of the model are the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland."

"The model can be run for different scenarios and combinations of smoking cessation aids, so that different strategies can be compared," says the WHO.

But what is this software? Nothing else but an offspring of SAMMEC II, the software used to create non-existing epidemics in the US, Canada, and many other countries. As incredible as it may seem, the WHO uses extremist, rabid anti-smoking groups like ASH as sources for information meant to be used by the international community. In October 1997, ASH was reported to the US FBI for promoting on its website a hate book (Gasp! -- A Novel of Revenge) in which a scheme for cyanide cigarette tampering, and the mass poisoning of smokers is described in great detail. That page is still proudly displayed by ASH today.

Back to ECOS, the whole electronic game is based on assumptions and speculations.

• By assuming as true any possible association/speculation between smoking and disease

• By attributing out-of-the blue (large) percentages of deaths to smoking for "smoking-related diseases" (that is, most diseases)

• By considering "premature" the death of smokers at any age

• By considering "preventable" the death of smokers at any age

• By ignoring the immense contribution of smokers to the economy of their country through tobacco taxation, and business and employment generation

• By underplaying the role that tobacco cultivation plays for the economies in which it is grown

• By totally ignoring its own twisted statements that smokers have shorter lives ("premature deaths," while CDC's own data belays those statements), and thus the fact that those shorter lives would benefit the nation by not being a burden on social systems

• By astutely using the truth that the consequences of any change done today would be felt more than twenty years from now -- thus deferring the consequences of this statistical fraud to a time when virtually any contemporary WHO operative of the anti-tobacco cartel will be long out of office

The WHO cartel wants us to believe that smoking is a plague with equal or greater number of victims than the Black Death of the 14^th century. And, of course, that the effects of this "Plague" will be reduced by buying the smoking cessation devices produced by its partners.

But this absurd and apocalyptic scenario is not real. It is just an electronic game of greed and politically corrupted science, the jackpot of which is immense political and financial rewards to the pharmaceutical multinationals and to the rest of the anti-tobacco cartel at the expense of honesty, economies, scientific integrity, and personal liberties.