Passive Smoking

Nice timing: just as Labour proposes a smoking ban in public places, including bars, along comes a new study claiming to show that passive smoking is twice as risky as previously thought.

The researchers noted that most studies on passive smoking examined the risks of living with someone who smoked. They said that while this was important, it did not take into account the additional exposure at work and other places such as pubs and restaurants.

The team said that by measuring cotinine — a by-product of nicotine — they could get a more accurate measure of exposure to smoke from all sources. The study focused on 4,792 men from 18 British towns who were monitored for 20 years.

The researchers took blood samples to measure cotinine, concluding that higher concentrations of the substance in the blood of non-smokers were associated with an increased risk of heart disease.

The level of cotinine was taken as indicative of the degree of passive smoking, and was then found to be associated with an increased risk of heart disease. Fair enough: one must, I suppose, accept that the researchers are right in saying that passive smoking is the only possible source of cotinine. But even if that is the case is it not highly likely that people who spend a great deal of time in bars inhaling the second-hand fumes of others are in general far more likely to have dodgy tickers than those who spend their leisure time striding across the open countryside? There's no evidence here that cotinine directly causes heart failure. It merely correlates with it. Research would surely find a positive correlation between time spent in pubs and risk of heart failure, and between amount of alcohol consumed and risk of heart failure, if for no other reason than lack of exercise, or bad diet. Passive smoking may have nothing to do with it.

But what the hell....it's the current orthodoxy.