Can anyone offer any confirmation or contradiction of this observation, which is one of the comments on this posting about the rights and wrongs of smoking bans:
One of the things I learned when going through insurance sales training was that life and health insurance companies do not take exposure to secondhand smoke into account at all when determining risk categories. Insurance companies have all sorts of super-detailed actuarial information for use in setting rates. None of this information shows any health risks associated with secondhand smoke.
I am actually a bit surprised if that is true. One of the reasons why there has been so much talk of “passive smoking” is that it makes such perfect sense that if smoking is very bad for you, smoke near you day after day would also be somewhat bad for you. This suggests no badness for you at all. Can that really be right?
This comment concerns the USA. I assume there is no particular arrangement there which actually forbids “passive smoking” being inquired into by insurance companies.
LATER: As I should have included in the above, the author of that comment also has a blog.
This same point was made by Penn and Teller once, on one of their shows. I suppose that it seemed to make sense, though thinking it through, it wouldn’t have been the smoke you blew out that gave you lung cancer, but the nicotine absorbed into your system. however, the past 50 years have been a free-for-all on Tobacco companies, so they’ll have a hard time rolling back these laws.
On a related issue, would Marijuana smoke have any second-hand effects? If it were de-criminalised, would we all be drugged by second-hand air from the few ganja-fanatics amongst us?
I’d imagine that second hand smoke exposure would be generally too hard to measure accurately and honestly to make it worthwhile for insurance companies to use unless the effect were extreme. Compared to “Do you put things in your mouth and set fire to them” anyway.
It’s a matter of dosage. The levels of supposed toxins inhaled by passive smokers are minute compared to those of smokers.
To be simplistic about it, chlorine is a ghastly poisonous gas in high dosages, but we deliberately put low doses in swimming pools, because at that level it is harmless.
Basically, the whole thing is made up by the Temperance Movement.
Perhaps the answer lies in hormosis: the idea that toxins in very small doses increase resistance to adverse effects.
No, Ian B is correct: the whole thing is made up by the anti-smoking nazis.
Why I hate blogs, part 15
Someone puts up an interesting post and asks for factual clarification. ‘I’d like to know that, too’, I think to myself, and click on the comments for the answer.
What do I see: just the usual pointless opining, general windbaggery and unevidenced assertions.
If you can answer the question, answer it; if you can’t, please shut up.
In reply to Nuke Gray: the nicotine has only neurological effects such as speeding up your body and making you want more. Lung cancer is caused by the shit such as benzene and other compounds with rings in them. (That’s why nicotine patches don’t give you lung cancer)
Scotty’s comment is “general windbaggery”, so you shut up. Laird is just a sheep, Richard Lubbock is a retard and Richard Thomas makes sense.
Scotty, Brian said,
He is clearly asking whether it can be right that passive smoke is harmless. That’s what the early comments, including mine, addressed.
I don’t know anything about insurance company policy, but Brian didn’t specifically ask about that. But on that question, it makes sense (if the corporations are sticking to real science) that they would not raise premiums in response to passive smoke. The quoted relative risks even by the Temperance Movement, are tiny- the BMA last I looked could only conjure 1.19. That is, less than a 1 in 5 increase in lung cancers over non-smokers. (In an entirely smoke free world, for every 5 people who get lung cancer, there would be only one more if they then all sat in smoke filled rooms 24/7. That’s too small to reliably measure, nor to seriously alter healthcare costs. It’s in the statistical noise).
Why does that prove that it is not a health risk. I am not sure if second hand smoke actually caused premature death but it is definitely not healthy!
I smoke a pipe intermittently. Pipe smokers, me at least, don’t inhale. The nicotine is absorbed through the gum tissue. I have been given to understand in various places, that smoking a pipe is not regarded as smoking by insurance companies. I don’t know how much truth there is in that.
From personal experience, it does.
I’m not at all surprised about this. I have friend that that works as an Epidemiologist for the NHS who says that the risks associated with second hand smoking are statistically irrelevant and according to him the only reason that second hand smoke has been played up so much is as a way of getting smokers (who have very high risks of getting cancer) to quit by making them fear they are harming others. If you are not actually sucking on a death stick the levels of tar are simply too low to be dangerous, partly because it gets dispersed into a large volume of air and partly because it is already stuck to the lungs of the smoker.
IIRC there was a massive study done in Sweden a few years ago, thousands of couples (one a smoker, the other not) were monitored for over a decade; result – no significant increase in lung disease among the non-smokers.
Originally the survey was funded by an off-shoot of WHO and an American cancer charity, but they withdrew funding when the preliminary results became available.
I had a friend who was a statistics expert, PhD with awards in the field. I asked him about the second hand smoke studies and the supposed issues with them. His response was he didn’t care about if the statistics were right or wrong, he hated how it smelled to be around a smoker and that was that.
In 30 years, there’s going to be a lot of “debunking” of early 21st century “science”, I expect.
All smoke is mildly carcinogenic, because of the benzene derivatives. Chimney sweeps used to be at a higher risk of cancer, because of exposure to soot, essentially concentrated smoke. However, under normal conditions, you’re not likely to suffer a significant increase in risk.
For people with asthma or chest infections, smoke of any kind is a more serious problem. It adds to the burden on their lungs, which have to clear the inhaled smoke out, and these people may already be near the edge of what their lungs can handle.
I suspect that insurance companies implicitly take into account average levels of smoke exposure for people with chronic chest conditions. That’d happen automatically if they didn’t bother to disaggregate groups exposed to differing levels of smoke, which isn’t worth doing if the variance is low.
In general though, second-hand smoke exposure is unpleasant, but only in the same way as standing next to someone who has neither washed themselves nor changed their clothes for at least six months – behaviour rightly frowned upon, but not something requiring state action.
The only real public good justification for prohibiting smoking outside private houses would be the fire hazard. Precautions can be taken to reduce this, but at a cost to the public purse. Where the balance here lies, I don’t know.
Unfortunately, as some of the above posters have noted, epidemiology has been subverted and used to serve the tobacco control – they say agenda, but the word ideology could be fairly substituted.
There hasn’t been an epidemiological study which has found SHS/ETS to be significant. This includes long run studies of spousal exposure. In some, the risk factor that emerges for SHS is actually protective. However, since SHS has been fixed on as part of the strategy to get people not to smoke – er – actively you will have to go looking for those numbers.
Anything which computes n deaths from SHS is therefore an untruth. The actuaries, who profit from the accuracy of the model are a far better source than the suspiciously accurate numbers you see in the press.
PJ:
What does it mean?
Alisa, the UN famously did a passive smoking study that found no statistically significant risk factors, except for one; that the children of smokers had less cancer. Taken at face value, it showed that passive smoking is protective against cancer. The UN tried to bury the study, when The Times hounded them for it, they responded with a press release hysterically entitled, “Don’t Let Them Fool You, Passive Smoke Kills!!!!111!11!!” and tried to claim that their own study was methodologically flawed by insufficient sample size(!)
Of course it’s highly unlikely that there is any protective effect. These very low risk factor figures are just sampling noise values.
Thanks Ian – instructive, to say the least.
Something I’ve been curious about for awhile. When my twins were born the doctors even told me about the mystical ‘particles’ that cling to me if I hold the infants within some hour or so of smoking.
These malevolent magical particles appears to be somewhat of a consensus, in the US anyway. The rule of thumb seems to be that if you smell like cigarettes it’s bad for the babies. I got looks at the ICU ’til I started washing up like a teenager fooling Mom.
Ian, it seems plausible that susceptibility to addiction to smoking may be a hereditary thing (as well as smoking being passed down culturally in families). If that’s the case, it seems reasonable that selection would be for those with a resistance to cancer, leading to an apparent benefit from second hand smoke (it’s not from the smoke itself though). I haven’t seen the study to know if they accounted for this though.
the risk factor that emerges for SHS is actually protective
What does it mean?
Sorry, Alisa, Ian beat me to it! Basically that the number if taken at face value would indicate that being a child of smoking parents actually protects against lung cancer. I think too, as Ian points out, this is likely to be an artefact of the data, but it does give strong indication that the ‘risk’ is not significant.
Logic dictates that the smokers lungs act as air filters for the rest of us. What we breathe in is not only filtered, but it is then diluted by mixing with a much much larger volume of air.
The first law of toxicology is that there are no toxic substances, only toxic doses. I suppose the same could be said for carcinogens.
When I was working in research in the chemical industry, I saw a very interesting presentation from Bruce Ames which proposed that cancer required two conditions : exposure to a mutagen of some sort and significant cell death/regrowth at the same time. (Ames is the namesake of a specific test method to screen for mutagenicity) Thus chemicals with mutagenic properties were not necessarily carcenogenic in isolation, but those compounds that were also toxic or used in combination with toxins were a major concern. (we had a specific compound that tested as cargenogenic in rats, but only at very high doses where it was also a liver toxin) I’m not in the field anymore, so I don’t know if the theory still holds any currency, but it certainly fits cigarette smoking to a tee. Lots of nasty mutagenistic aromatic compounds, along with a big slug of carbon monoxide and other toxins = cancer. In second hand smoke both the mutagens and toxins are massively diluted, and the toxic impact is probably negligible.
In my family, both my parents smoked heavily. Myself and both siblings HATED the smell, which always struck me odd as we had grown up with it.
When I was about 9, we got an aquarium; the filtering arrangement was an external air pump connected to a submerged filter via clear plastic hose. We were intrigued by the brown stain that slowly crept up the hose over a period of months. Over a year, the darkest part was nearly black. There was obviously significant “stuff” in the air from the cigarettes.
None of us children had the slightest interest in taking up the habit. I suspect it is this aspect of second-hand smoke that confers a benefit to children of smokers.
Samsam von Virginia
Thanks PJ:-)
This is a subject close to my heart. The insurance companies are the only ones who look at statistics impartially these days.
The medical industry knows it can make a fortune by swapping people over from tobacco over to drug industry equivalents – and supporting anti smoking campaigns is a great way of doing that!
As for the facts, Even Dr Richard Doll, who became famous by highlighting the connection between lung cancer and smoking thought that passive smoking was irrelevant – its only the political anti smoking nazis who have been pushing the dangers of second hand smoke because it can’t be proven!
The reality is that people die of lung cancer for lots of different reasons. The cancer can be brought on by diesel fumes, pneumonia and its related bacteria as well as just smoking 20+ fags a day.
Its interesting that people who smoke less than 8 a day don’t get lung cancer – as noticed in a health study in Australia in 1989. However, who on earth can justify selling anti smoking paraphernalia if it was known that smoking wasn’t half as dangerous as their propaganda would have you believe?
As an earlier poster noted, in 30 or 40 years time, we’ll all be falling over ourselves at the stupidity of early 21st century society – I just hope I’m around to say I told you so!
Samsam, FWIW, a friend of mine used to fly Fokker Friendships back in the 70s and early 80s when smoking was allowed in airliners.
The maintenance personnel told him, when smoking was banned that there were two things that happened. The pressurization outflow valves wouldn’t stick because there was no tar buildup and it became more difficult to find skin cracks in the aircraft which formerly had been revealed by cigarette smoke stains.
Mike, we are watching the earlier seasons of the British show QI, and I just saw the show where the host, Stephen Fry, explains that in the days when one could smoke in planes, the air was fresher for all- because they made sure to cleanse the air, and bring in fresh air from outside. Now plane companies have cut their own costs (much less air conditioning is needed or installed), but passengers are breathing stailer air! so smoking was better for the passengers alround, paradoxical as it may seem.
Ban smoking in public environments like the UK?
That is undoubtedly true, Nuke (I would never doubt the inimitable Stephen Fry!), but in fairness I would point out that the airlines weren’t very good at truly separating the smoking and non-smoking areas. If you were in the first row of the non-smoking section, immediately behind a row of smokers and not even separated by a partial bulkhead, the air was indeed pretty foul. I don’t approve of the government mandate (it should, and I think eventually would, have been customer-driven), but I for one prefer non-smoking planes. I just wish the airlines would improve on the air quality, as you noted.
I used to sell life insurance, and the company I represented had the same rates for people exposed to second hand smoke as those not around smokers at all. In other words, the company’s statistics showed no significant increase in mortality due to exposure to second hand smoke. That doesn’t mean that second hand smoke might not give you irritated eyes or such, only that it isn’t going to kill you.
No one knows what causes cancer. The causal mechanism and etiology are unknown. Anybody that tells you this or that causes cancer or this or that will prevent or cure cancer is BSing you.
Here are the facts. In 1971 President Nixon signed the national cancer act and the National Cancer Institute was tasked to find the cause of cancer. They confidently predicted they would find the cause within 5 years, by 1976. Well, have you ever seen the NCI announce they have discovered the cause of cancer? The answer is no. The last time I checked they were confidently predicting they would discover the cause of cancer by 2015. Look at this NCI website, the next to last paragraph.
http://training.seer.cancer.gov/disease/war/ .
If something actually caused cancer, 100% of the people exposed would contract the disease. All a carcinogen can do is increase the probability of one’s getting it (which might still be very low). As Ray says, the etiology is unknown, and it might be entirely different for different forms of cancer. But I will accept the judgment of life insurance companies, which have a direct economic stake in getting the answer right, over that of any advocacy group (which includes any governmental agency and the NCI) any day.
Oh, I forgot to add: “Baa, Baa.” (As I am “just a sheep”.)
It may or may not be a health risk but still if you do smoke you can always smoke where there are less or no people around. That way either passive smoke risk is real or not you are sure that you were not the one who caused it. 🙂
These companies are only saying that passive smoking isn’t a risk as it allows them to charge a higher premium for their life insurance coverage.