coffeesp00ns:

I'm starting to get a little suspicious of this article. For one, A quick google search for "American Cancer Institute" gets results for the American Cancer society, the National Cancer Institute, the American Institute for Cancer Research, the Association of American Cancer Institutes, the Persian American Cancer Institute, but not the "ACI", as it were. It seems to me that they should at least have a relatively easily findable internet presence.

I also can't seem to find the WHO article from 1998 that they talk about. Now, I'm not the best at using google scholar, so maybe someone else can pull it up. It also strikes me as odd that he doesn't link to the source, but instead to Forest Online, a website subtitled "Voice and Friend of the Smoker", who ALSO don't link to the cited source.

His first citation links to this page. From the "About this Journal" tab on the study he's linking to:

    JNCI is published twice monthly by Oxford University Press and is not affiliated with the United States National Cancer Institute.

I also find it telling that the article being cited is not in the "Articles" section, where there are studies, but instead in the "News" section. I can't find a page where I can look at its citations either, maybe I need to have a login to do that.

Now, all of this is to say that, while this doesn't refute the point being made, it certainly makes me think twice about believing it, especially when there are numerous other studies that link second hand smoke (or indeed its doublespeak alternative, "Passive smoking") to coronary heart diease, Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, and exascerbation of already-present Asthma in children.


posted 3772 days ago