As the United Nations and the World Health Organization put the finishing touches on a new global treaty designed to curb worldwide tobacco use and advertising, controversy has arisen from a previous — but little publicized — study completed by WHO in March 1998 concluding there is no link between second-hand smoke and cancer.
According to the London Telegraph, which first publicized the study last year, researchers at the WHO found "that not only might there be no link between passive smoking and lung cancer, but that it could even have a protective effect."
"The study is one of the largest ever to look at the link between passive smoking — or environmental tobacco smoke — and lung cancer, and had been eagerly awaited by medical experts and campaigning groups," the Telegraph wrote. It involved twelve research centers and seven European countries.
The study compared 650 lung cancer patients with 1,542 healthy people, and examined people who were married to smokers, worked with smokers, both worked with and were married to smokers, and those who grew up with smokers. "The results are consistent with there being no additional risk for a person living or working with a smoker and could be consistent with passive smoke having a protective effect against lung cancer," the Telegraph said.
The study, seen by the Telegraph, also stated, "There was no association between lung cancer risk and ETS (environmental tobacco smoke) exposure during childhood."
In an earlier report, the Telegraph published a story calling the mania over passive cigarette smoke a "false alarm" because researchers at Colorado State University found that lung cancer rates of women married to smokers are 60 percent lower than previous studies had shown, and that the extra risk may even be statistically "negligible."
The Colorado team, led by Dr. Geof Givens, reexamined some 35 previous studies on the effects of passive cigarette smoke. They found that similar studies debunking the second-hand smoke theory were often overlooked because, according to the Telegraph, "scientists think that the results are not worthwhile, or they are rejected by scientific journals."
“Failing to allow for these would mean the estimated excess risk may be overstated by around 30 percent, both in U.S. studies and in the global collection of studies,” said Givens’ report.
But the team also reexamined one of the most influential studies of passive smoking, published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1992. In that study, the EPA claimed non-smoking women married to smokers faced a 19 percent higher risk of lung cancer. When taking into account publication bias, the Colorado team found that the extra risk fell to 10 – 60 percent lower than that claimed — and could be completely negligible.
The team concluded that unless publication bias was taken into account, “we still run grave risks of making decisions based on very limited, and very biased, data," said the Telegraph.
After the paper published the results of the WHO study, some of the world’s leading experts on passive smoking admitted the results "failed to find any statistically significant extra risk" posed from second-hand tobacco smoke.
The new UN/WHO treaty aims for an international agreement "on a legally binding … treaty against tobacco, focusing on a global ban on cigarette advertising, an increase in taxes on tobacco products and the right to a smoke-free environment," according to a Reuters report.
“There is growing evidence to suggest the tobacco industry has subverted science, public health and political processes to sell a product that addicts its consumers before killing them,” said former three-time Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, who hopes to have the treaty in place by 2003.
"However," said the Telegraph, "the (continued) rejection (as non-significant) of the findings from the WHO study looks set to trigger accusations that ‘politically correct’ scientists deliberately suppress data which fails to support their own beliefs."
