Kuneman: 40 Secondhand Smoke Studies Find No Risk!

A great West County Journal post by Keep St. Louis Free spokesman David Kuneman:

Over 40 studies on Pub Med, which is the National Library of Medicine's online database, find no harm from SHS. One, published by Lawrence Garfinkel, who at the time was the Vice President of Epidemiology and Statistics for the American Cancer Society, found no risk. It was a huge study conducted over a 20-year time span. It is the type called a cohort study. Those kind identify huge groups of volunteers (all healthy) who describe their SHS exposure, and then the researchers recontact those individuals over time, to see if more of the exposed group got sick than the control group. Those kind of studies rarely find any risk from SHS. The kind the antismokers conduct ask nonsmokers who are sick and those who are not sick about their SHS exposure. If more who rate themselves as heavily exposed are sick than those who are ligthly exposed, then they claim SHS is risky. This type is easy to cherry pick because the researcher knows the outcome ahead of time. Since these researchers need to please their funding sources, which are the antismoking groups, that's why they can mislead you, and the media, by claiming most studies provide as you stated "overwhelming evidence". What is missed here, is that the quality of your evidence is low- ours is high.

http://westcountyjournal.stltoday.com/articles/2008/08/26/news/sj2tn20080826-0827web-smoke0.ii1.txt