On a day when junk science was inescapable, the BBC's Radio 1 website managed to sink to new depths.
Doctors call for smoking ban in all enclosed spaces
Really? They kept that quiet. You'd think they'd have a well co-ordinated media onslaught, with press releases, fraudulent statistics, press, embargoes etc.
That, of course, is not the bit I'm talking about. This is.
Matthew quit when his four-year-old daughter got asthma.
"We were going to the hospital and we told the doctor. She said it was the particles on her clothing that was the real effect for her asthma."
This is the thirdhand smoke myth, is it not? If this anecdote is true, and it's not just some ASH stooge telling tale tales, this doctor should be struck off. There is no place in medicine for the near-medieval superstitions that this quack is peddling. Get rid of her.
"That was when we realised it wasn't helping even smoking outside."
"We thought we were doing the right thing by going outside and smoking. We didn't want to smoke in the house with the kids because of the passive smoking.
"We thought going outside was eliminating it, but it wasn't."
Dear me. A lie really can get around while the truth is still putting its shoes on.
A few weeks ago someone found this blog under the key phrase 'can third hand smoke cause a 1 year old to wheeze?' That stuck in my mind because I pictured a mother whose baby was unwell neglecting the real reason for its illness in favour of some garbage she had read in a newspaper.
That, to me, is the human cost of all this trash. Lies have been everywhere today and those who have told them will go home believing that it's all in a good cause. They have said, for example, that passive smoking causes 40 cot deaths a year.
Now, I can sit here and explain that this is an estimate built on a projection built on a flawed study. I can tell you that the supposed relative risk is almost certainly due to a failure to control for socio-economic status. I could add that cot deaths are rare in countries like Russia which have high smoking rates and that there is no correlation between rates of smoking and rates of cot death. But ultimately what matters is that some parents who have been bereaved through cot death, and happened to smoke, will feel that they are to blame for their child's death. And that, I think, is unforgivable.
