Alright, folks, I cannot (nor can anyone) prove a negative.....I cannot 'prove' that smoking does not cause cancer, heart disease or herpes....So, the burden of proof falls to others to prive, imperically, that smoking does cause something in particular. Let's take cancer - it seems to be the most associated disease with smoking.
Here are some figures for you to chew on while trying to prove that smoking causes cancer. Here are your 'statistics' that prove how much cancer is caused by smoking.....
The Oxford Atlas of the World, ISBN 0-19-520955-9, published in 1992, gives figures for cigarette consumption in different countries during the time period 1986-1988. The figures are in annual consumption of cigarettes per capita.
Country: Consumption:
Hungary 2515
Japan 2510
USA 2020
South Africa 1950
UK 1700
France 1690
USSR 1650
Brazil 1200
Philipines 1150
Venezuela 950
Zaire 150
India 100
So, based on this, if smoking causes lung cancer, it should be easy enough to expect that lung cancer death rates, by country, should follow rather closely the same exact same list, right? SPMONKEY, as a biologist, you would say that the proof would be there, right? I mean surely, if all your assertations about smoking and cancer are true then it must follow suit!
the World Bank puts out a book which gives statistics for a number of countries which give disease statistics in a form known as "45Q15". The "45Q15" number represents the percentage risk of someone who is 15 years old dying from a particular disease by the time he or she is 60. Figures are not available for all countries; such important ones as the former USSR and India either don't report at all or don't break down deaths from cancer into different types of cancer. Never-the-less, we do have LCDR's for some of the countries for which we have smoking consumption figures. All of the following statistics are in 45Q15 format, which means they are risk figures in percentages.
In the United States, the male LCDR is 1.4%, the female risk is 0.7%. Hungary, with the highest rate of cigarette consumption of any country, has a male LCDR of 2.4; female 0.5%. Hungary shares the highest rates with its neighbor, Czechoslovakia, where the male rate is 2.4% and the female rate is 0.3%. Prima facie, these figures indicate that a high smoking rate is associated with a high LCDR. Or do they?
Let's look at Japan. As we have seen, Japan is practically tied with Hungary for the highest rate of cigarette consumption in the world. It turns out, however, that the male LCDR in Japan is 0.5%. That's approximately one-fifth the rate in Hungary; approximately one-third the U.S. rate. The LCDR for females in Japan is also astonishingly low, 0.2%.
Furthermore, although they have the highest smoking rate of any major nation, the Japanese are remarkably healthy! At birth, a Japanese male has a whopping life expectancy of 75 years (as opposed to 72 in the U.S.A.). Japanese girls, at birth, have a life expectancy of 80 years. Those are the highest life expectancies in the entire world.
Another heavy smoking nation is China. The authors of the World Bank book tell us so, and a recent PBS special concentrated on the "alarming" rate of smoking in China. In fact, in China, the government grows tobacco and receives much of its revenue from cigarette sales. In China, however, the LCDR is about the same as in Japan: 0.56% for men; 0.39% for women, in 1988, the last year for which we have World Bank information.
Interestingly, some nations in the tropical and sub-tropical belts have very low LCDR's, notwithstanding evidence suggesting that smoking is widespread in these countries. In Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean where tobacco is an important crop, the LCDR for males is only 0.4; for females it is 0.1. In Barbados, the male LCDR is 0.5; the female rate is zero. In the Seychelles, an island paradise in the Indian Ocean, the male LCDR is 0.4; the female LCDR is 1.0, making that nation the only one in the entire world, where the female rate exceeds the male rate.
At least one researcher has suggested that the low LCDR's in the tropical and sub-tropical countries are attributable to the exposure of the residents to sunshine, which raises vitamin D levels. That theory, however, fails to explain the very low LCDR's in China and Japan which are not tropical or sub-tropical countries.
So, how can you ever prove that smoking causes lung cancer?????