Scientist Fired for non PC research

3 Responses to Scientist Fired for non PC research

1. Tina says:

   Friday, September 3, 2010 at 11:19 am

   More environmentalist manipulation of scientific findings to push the green agenda. The cost is growing ever higher and I don’t mean just in dollars, although that is staggering. Jobs are being lost, the integrity of the scientific and educational communities is now in doubt along with the faith we once had in these communities, and the division in the country that’s been created has become contentious. Sad, very sad.

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2. Chris says:

   Friday, September 3, 2010 at 3:50 pm

   “Enstrom, an epidemiologist at UCLA’s School of Public Health, has a history of running against the grain. In 2003 he wrote a study, published in the British Medical Journal, in which he found no causal relationship between secondhand smoke and tobacco-related death – a conclusion that drew fire both because it was contrary to popular scientific belief and because it was funded by Philip Morris.”

   Uh…and you really think that he was fired because of the “PC agenda,” and not because of his own? You think this guy is trustworthy? I think it’s clear that he’s the one letting politics get in the way of accurate science, which makes him unfit to teach students.

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3. Tina says:

   Friday, September 3, 2010 at 6:05 pm

   More cut and paste demonstrates that Dr. Enstrom is not alone in his thinking:

   http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv21n4/lies.pdf

   The war on smoking started with a kernel of truththat cigarettes are a high risk factor for lung cancerbut has grown into a monster of deceit and greed, eroding the credibility of government and subverting the rule of law. Junk science has replaced honest science and propaganda parades as fact. Our legislators and judges, in need of dispassionate analysis, are instead smothered by an avalanche of statisticstendentious, inadequately documented, and unchecked by even rudimentary notions of objectivity. Meanwhile, Americans are indoctrinated
   by health professionals bent on imposing their lifestyle choices on the rest of us and brainwashed by politicians eager to tap the deep pockets of a pariah industry.

   The aim of this paper is to dissect the granddaddy of all tobacco liesthat smoking causes 400,000 deaths each year. To set the stage, lets look at two of the many exaggerations, misstatements, and outright fabrications that have dominated the tobacco debate from the outset.

   THIRD-RATE THINKING ABOUT SECONDHAND SMOKE

   Passive Smoking Does Cause Lung Cancer, Do Not Let Them Fool You, states the headline of a March 1998 press release from the World Health Organization. The release begins by noting that WHO had been accused of suppressing its own study because it failed to scientifically prove that there is an association between passive smoking . . . and a number of diseases, lung cancer in particular. Not true, insisted WHO. Smokers themselves are not the only ones who suffer health problems because of their habit; secondhand smoke can be fatal as well. The press release went on to report that WHO researchers found an estimated 16 percent increased risk of lung cancer among nonsmoking spouses of smokers. For workplace exposure the estimated increase in risk was 17 percent. Remarkably, the very next line warned: Due to small sample size, neither increased risk was statistically significant.

   Contrast that conclusion with the hype in the headline: Passive Smoking Does Cause Lung Cancer. Spoken often enough, the lie becomes its own evidence.
   The full study would not see the light of day for seven more months, until October 1998, when it was finally published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. News reports omitted any mention of statistical insignificance. Instead, they again trumpeted relative risks of 1.16 and 1.17, corresponding to 16 and 17 percent increases, as if those ratios were meaningful. Somehow lost in WHOs media blitz was the National Cancer Institutes own guideline: Relative risks of less than 2 [that is, a 100 percent increase] are considered small. . . . Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias, or effects of confounding factors that are sometimes not evident. To put the WHO results in their proper perspective, note that the relative risk of lung cancer for persons who drink whole milk is 2.4. That is, the increased risk of contracting lung cancer from whole milk is 140 percentmore than eight times the 17 percent increase from secondhand smoke.

   What should have mattered most to government officials, the health community and concerned parents is the following pronouncement from the WHO study: After examining 650 lung cancer patients and 1,500 healthy adults in seven European countries, WHO concluded that the results indicate no association between childhood exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and lung cancer risk.

   http://www.fumento.com/disease/smoking.html

   Looking for a surer method of being ripped apart than entering a lions den covered with catnip? Conduct the most exhaustive, longest-running study on second-hand smoke and death. Find no connection. Then rather than being PC and hiding your data in a vast warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant, publish it in one of the worlds most respected medical journals.
   Thats what research professor James Enstrom of UCLA and professor Geoffrey Kabat of the State University of New York, Stony Brook discovered last May. Thats when they reported in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) that their 39-year study of 35,561 Californians who had never smoked showed no “causal relationship between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) and tobacco-related mortality,” adding, however “a small effect” cant be ruled out.
   At this writing there have been over 140 responses on http://www.bmj.com, and if made into a movie they would be called “The Howling.” Many are mere slurs several grades below even sophomoric.
   Some demanded the BMJ retract the study because, as one put it, the “tobacco industry will use it.” (It didnt). Another made the rather draconian call to ban all use of statistics in science, lest they be put to such wicked purposes as this.

   “It is astounding how much of the criticism springs from (personal attacks) rather than from scientific criticism of the study itself,” observed one of the few supportive writers. Said another: “As a publisher of the leading Austrian medical online news service, I feel quite embarrassed following the debate on this article. Many postings look more like a witch hunt than a scientific debate.”
   Sadly, one of the most pathetic responses came from Dr. Michael Thun, vice president for epidemiology and surveillance research at the American Cancer Society. The ACS started the study and formerly collaborated with the authors. Thun claimed that since there was so much exposure to smokers back in the 1950s and 1960s that essentially everybody was a second-hand smoker.

   This logic puts the wife of a two-pack-a-day husband in the same category as somebody who once stumbled into a smoky bar. It negates all ETS studies based on spousal exposure including those serving Thuns purposes. But based on the subjects own recollection decades later in the UCLA study, spousal smoking was indeed a good indicator of their total exposure to second-hand smoke.
   One refrain running through the attacks is, “Why take seriously a study that contradicts what everyone already knows?” But “what everyone knows” is wrong. Its the UCLA study thats very much in the majority.

   A 1999 Environmental Health Perspectives survey of 17 ETS-heart disease studies found only five that were statistically significantly positive. (“Statistical significance” refers to whether an increased or decreased risk falls outside the bounds of what could be expected by chance.) The lead author? Why, Michael Thun!
   Likewise, a 2002 analysis of 48 studies regarding a possible ETS link to lung cancer found 10 that were significantly positive, one that was actually significantly negative, and 37 that like Enstrom and Kabats were insignificant either way.
   The reason active tobacco smoking could be such a terrible killer while ETS may cause no deaths lies in the dictum “the dose makes the poison.” We are constantly bombarded by carcinogens, but in tiny amounts the body usually easily fends them off.

   A New England Journal of Medicine study found that even back in 1975 when having smoke obnoxiously puffed into your face was ubiquitous in restaurants, cocktail lounges, and transportation lounges the concentration was equal to merely 0.004 cigarettes an hour. In scientific terminology, thats called a “tiny amount.”
   Unable to find significant faults in the UCLA study itself, critics repeatedly harped on what Enstrom and Kabat had clearly stated that some of the funding was from the tobacco industry. As they explained, this became necessary when the University of California Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program, which was specifically set up to support this type of research, stopped their funding and no other sources were available.

   The big bucks go to those who “discover” that ETS causes everything from pimples to piles. Both governmental and private organizations have directed tens of millions of dollars to groups promoting ETS as a killer, perhaps even a greater killer than active smoking! Meanwhile Big Tobacco has essentially extinguished its efforts on ETS, reserving new spending and political capital for other fights.

   So give the BMJ and Enstrom and Kabat an “F” for political correctness. But give them an “A” for honesty and courage.

   Disclaimer: Neither Michael Fumento nor the Hudson Institute receive money from tobacco interests.

   Now tell us again what groups are playing politics and the government grant funding game…then tell us again who it is that is “fit” to be an educator!

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