Second-hand smoking studies

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Nasor

Valued Senior Member
Is anyone aware of any studies that have shown a link between second-hand smoke and lung cancer? I've read over a lot of studies, but the evidence is very unconvincing. Many of the studies actually show that there is no link between cancer and second hand smoke. The studies that do show a link all seem to have ridiculously low relative risk factors - usually around 1.1-1.5. Studies with a relative risk factor below 2 are usually not taken seriously by epidemiologists, since anything under 2 is usually indistinguishable from random fluctuations in the data.

Everyone seems to take it for granted that second hand smoke is dangerous, but I've yet to see a study that actually supports the claim. Does anyone know of any? I'm seriously asking here, not trying to start an argument about second hand smoke. With all the noise that we hear about the dangers of second hand smoke, it seems like there should be at least one convincing study out there.
 
Dastardly harmful or not it is still advised to not be a second hand smoker.

It is surprising to hear that second hand smoke studies haven't proven very resounding results.
 
Do you have a link for this? I would like to see this. I tend to agree that the studies probably are not convincing. For all I know, lung cancer in a non-smoker could be caused by the frigging pollution that we pump into the atmosphere. These pollutants cause other lung illnesses. So, why not lung cancer to?
 
It's not hard to find studies that don't show a strong link between second hand smoke and cancer. Just search for 'second hand smoking studies' or something similar on the webpages of public health organizations like the WHO, NIH, CDC, etc.

It's especially annoying when you see news stories with headlines like 'new study shows that smoking causes breast caner in women,' then when you read the article you see that they had a relative risk factor of 1.2, or something equally ridiculous.
 
Nasor said:
It's especially annoying when you see news stories with headlines like 'new study shows that smoking causes breast caner in women,' then when you read the article you see that they had a relative risk factor of 1.2, or something equally ridiculous.
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Well propaganda and media influence is actually used for positive effects in this case. Whatever scares people into shaping up their habits...sure the methods to do this maybe be questionable.

Smoking itself does not need anymore media and after all the lies the smoking industry has perpetuated to sell products it is nice to feed some of their medicine back to them even though, technically, saying that "smoking is linked with breast cancer" is the truth....with negation of the rests of the facts.
 
Well Nasor, think about it. Second hand smokers literally breath all the extra carcinogens that smokers don't (due to their filter) as well as most of the primary smoke! Unless there are beneficial chemicals in the 2nd hand smoke which counter-effect the primary damage (which we know there isn't), it is very harmful.
 
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