Thirdhand smoke

The 'thirdhand smoke' canard has reared its head again today. If users of e-cigarettes weren't worried before, they should be now. Not by the health risks, of course, but by the seemingly infinite capacity of the University of California to produce junk science to further the tobacco control agenda. 

More on the study later in the week. For now, here's the article I wrote when the lie was born last year. Interestingly, the Dr Winickoff mentioned below is the same Dr Winickoff who is helping to lead the charge against e-cigarettes.

Thirdhand smoke: A scare is born

For many years, the concept of 'thirdhand smoke' was reserved for political satirists and stand-up comedians. In January 2009, however, the laughter stopped.

Thirdhand smoke is, according to the New York Times:

"the invisible yet toxic brew of gases and particles clinging to smokers' hair and clothing, not to mention cushions and carpeting, that lingers long after second-hand smoke has cleared from a room. The residue includes heavy metals, carcinogens and even radioactive materials that young children can get on their hands and ingest, especially if they're crawling or playing on the floor."

Dr Winickoff, a Boston pediatrician, put it rather more strongly in an interview with Scientific American:

"Smokers themselves are also contaminated... smokers actually emit toxins."

And to the BBC, he said:

"The dangers of third-hand smoke are very real - when you smoke - any place - toxic particulate matter from tobacco smoke gets into your hair and clothing."

Dr. Winickoff has had a high profile since he co-authored a paper in the journal Pediatrics which brought thirdhand smoke to the attention of the mainstream media. But the real inspiration behind the new scare is his colleague Prof. Georg Matt.

Matt, a psychology lecturer at San Diego Univeristy, has been on the trail of third-hand smoke for five years. His first foray into this virgin territory came in 2004 when he published 'Households contaminated by environmental tobacco smoke: sources of infant exposures' in the Tobacco Control journal. That study failed to generate any press interest and thirdhand smoke remained a joke until the summer of 2006, when Matt made another effort to promote it. Perhaps spotting a silly season story in the making, the thirdhand smoke theory was reported in Britain with sensational headlines such as 'Hugging can expose infants to smoking health risk' (The Scotsman) and 'Even smoking outside can harm your baby' (The Daily Mail).

In the 2004 study, Matt's team found nicotine levels to be twice as high in the bedrooms of children whose parents claimed not to smoke outdoors than in the bedrooms of nonsmokers' offspring. The implication was that even if a mother smoked at the bottom her garden, she was bringing in dangerous toxins that would double her child's risk of developing smoking related diseases. And yet the doses in either case remained exceptionally small. The bedrooms of nonsmokers had nicotine concentrations of 0.09 mcg/m3 whilst the children of smokers had concentrations of 0.22 mcg/m3.

To provide some perspective, the legal limit of workplace exposure in the US is 500 mcg/m3, some 2,500 times more than was found in the smokers' households. The reality was that nicotine levels in the bedrooms of a completely nonsmoking family's house are effectively zero and a doubling or trebling makes no real difference. It would take a paranoid hypochondriac to believe that such sub-microscopic traces pose a threat to health.

In truth, Matt's 'discovery' owed more to the ability of expensive scientific apparatus to detect particles even when they can be only counted in parts per trillion. The fact that he was able to detect nicotine in an astonishing 97% of nonsmoking households bore testament to the wonders of modern technology but was it conceivable that these trace levels represented risk?

According to the notorious Surgeon General's report of 2006 there was indeed reason to believe that such minute quantities could be life-threatening. In the course of the press conference staged to publicise the report, Surgeon General Richard Carmona famously announced:

"There is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke."

Lest anyone misunderstand what he was getting at, he added:

"Stay away from smokers."

The idea that there was no safe level of secondhand smoke turned the laws of science on their head. The first rule of toxicology is that the dose makes the poison. All substances are toxic at high enough levels just as they are harmless, even beneficial, at lower levels.

Most of us understand that coffee contains benzene, water contains arsenic and that televisions pump out radiation but we don't let it worry us since the levels of these highly carcinogenic toxins are too low to pose a threat to our health. Apparently only one substance disobeys this law of toxicology: secondhand smoke.

In his eagerness to wage war on cigarettes - a product that Carmona said he would like to see made illegal - the Surgeon General's office had laid the foundations for a retreat into anti-science and the door was opened to thirdhand smoke.

It is apt, then, that the new thirdhand smoke 'study' begins by citing the now-retired Surgeon General:

"The 2006 Surgeon General's report on involuntary smoking concluded that more than 126 million people are exposed to secondhand smoke (SHS), 50,000 deaths per year are caused by SHS, and there is no "safe" level of exposure."

Setting the scene, the authors then provide a list of substances found in tobacco smoke accompanied by nasty-sounding products that also contain them.

"According to the National Toxicology Program, these 250 poisonous gases, chemicals, and metals include hydrogen cyanide (used in chemical weapons), carbon monoxide (found in car exhaust), butane (used in lighter fluid), ammonia (used in household cleaners), toluene (found in paint thinners), arsenic (used in pesticides), lead (formerly found in paint), chromium (used to make steel), cadmium (used to make batteries), and polonium-210 (highly radioactive carcinogen)."

There was a time when serious scientific journals were able to list chemicals without having to explain them to their readers. That time, it seems, has now passed. Dr Winickoff upped the baby-talk when talking to Scientific American. Asked the question: "What do you consider the most dangerous compound in cigarette smoke?" he replied:

"I would say cyanide, which is used in chemical weapons. It actually interferes with the release of oxygen to tissues. It competitively binds to hemoglobin. Basically people with cyanide poison turn blue... [And] arsenic, that is a poison used to kill mammals. We [used to] use it to kill rats. And there it is in cigarette smoke." 

None of the six authors are chemists or toxicologists. Three of them are social psychologists, one has a master's degree in English and the other two are pediatricians with a background in tobacco control. Remarkably, for a study so overburdened with authors, there is no new research in Matt's paper. Everything within its six pages is based upon a 2005 telephone survey that is conducted every year by the Social Climate Survey of Tobacco Control, with one question taking centre stage:

"One question was asked to assess health belief about thirdhand smoke. Respondents were asked whether they strongly agreed, agreed, disagreed, or strongly disagreed with the following statement:


"Breathing air in a room today where people smoked yesterday can harm the health of infants and children."

Respondents who strongly agreed and agreed with this statement were categorized as holding the belief that thirdhand smoke harms the health of children."


The findings of the study/survey, as reported by the press, were that:

"His team surveyed more than 1,500 households, asking smokers and non-smokers about their attitudes. They found that while 95% of non-smokers and 85% of smokers agreed that direct inhalation of second-hand smoke was harmful to children, just 65% of non-smokers, and 43% of smokers believed the same for "third-hand" smoke."

As this quote from the BBC indicates, the media reacted with shock that "just 65%" of the public knew that thirdhand smoke was harmful. But why should anyone believe in a concept that had only just been invented? The BBC itself had never before mentioned it, nor had most other news organisations. There was no evidence at all that tobacco particles lodged into carpets and clothing posed a threat to health and Georg Matt's study neither provided any nor cited any.

The nearest thing to evidence against thirdhand smoke had been a solitary study that claimed that cognitive skills were poorer amongst children whose parents smoked outdoors than amongst the children of nonsmokers. The study was highly questionable since it assumed that thirdhand smoke 'exposure' accounted for the difference between the children's abilities when social and genetic factors were more likely to have been at work. Indeed, there is a small but growing body of evidence that suggested that nicotine improves cognitive function.

Either way, no further study has appeared to support it and, more to the point, no study has ever shown thirdhand smoke to be deleterious to physical health. Oddly, the more obvious 'smoking related' diseases of the heart and lungs have been wholly ignored by thirdhand smoke researchers.

Throughout the paper, the authors appear indifferent to the fact that no evidence exists to support their theory. As the title of the study indicates, they are more interested in whether the belief in thirdhand smoke will encourage home smoking bans.

"We hypothesized that belief about the harmful health effects of thirdhand smoke would be associated with higher rates of strict no-smoking policies within the home."

Since the ends justifies the means in the world of tobacco control, thirdhand smoke is useful if it helps to modify the public's behaviour and of little interest if it doesn't. Whether the theory is actually valid or not is of secondary importance. Like a religion, thirdhand smoke is about faith, not science, for there is no science to mention. The study itself is called 'Beliefs About the Health Effects of "Thirdhand" Smoke and Home Smoking Bans' and it is around beliefs that the study revolves.

Despite a conspicuous lack of hard, or even soft, evidence, a host of news organisations including ABC, The Telegraph, The New York Times, NBC, the BBC, The Toronto Star and The Chicago Tribune rushed to report the shocking news that one third of the population were unaware of the perils of thirdhand smoke. Although most journalists had never heard of the term until they were sent the press release, they feigned surprise at the appalling statistics that "only 65%" of the public were mindful of thirdhand smoke. No one wanted to admit that they, too, had never heard of the perils of thirdhand smoke.

It was a masterstroke by Georg Matt and his team. Their greatest weakness was that thirdhand smoke was almost universally unrecognised even as a concept. Worse still, it had not one shred of evidence to support it. Ingeniously, they turned these weaknesses into their strengths. Like the tailors who made the emperor's new clothes, the authors dared the media to admit that they were ignorant of thirdhand smoke and, winning the bluff, blasted the idea into the public consciousness.

This study breaks new ground by using the opinions and beliefs of random members of the public as a substitute for scientific evidence. In recent years, the anti-smoking movement has been accused of conducting science by press release; bypassing the scientific process to influence public opinion. The movement's first study of 2009 displays a bold new tactic: using public opinion to bypass science.

Is thirdhand smoke a plausible health threat?

There is no biological, toxicological or epidemiological evidence to suggest that thirdhand smoke poses any threat to health. The closest thing we have to a scientific study on the subject appeared in 2004 and was also co-authored by Georg Matt.

In it, levels of nicotine found in the smokers' living rooms were reported to be 0.32 mcg/m3 compared to 0.10 mcg/m3 in the nonsmokers'. Levels of cotinine (a bio-marker for tobacco smoke - and an anagram of nicotine) were found to be between 0.33 ng/ml and 0.43 ng/ml in the children of nonsmokers.

Amongst the children of smokers who did not smoke in the home, cotinine levels fell between 2.47 ng/ml and 3.49 ng/ml. According to Matt, this seven-fold increase is proof of "persistently high levels of tobacco toxins" in the homes of smokers who do not smoke in the house. Although it is quite possible that this is the result of undeclared smoking in the home by some subjects, Matt believes that it is the result of "off-gassing" from tobacco smoke that has been absorbed into the hair and clothes of smokers. He explicitly refers to these trace quantities as Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS) ie. secondhand smoke.

"ETS contamination and ETS exposure were 5-7 times higher in households of smokers trying to protect their infants by smoking outdoors than in households of non-smokers."

"To our knowledge, this is the first study to document that surfaces, dust, and air are contaminated in homes of smokers with infants. Infants of smokers are at risk of ETS exposure in their homes through dust, surfaces, and air."

Sheer speculation of course, but the fact that nicotine was detected in no fewer than 97% of the non-smoking households raises an interesting question. In the study, nicotine is used as a marker for secondhand smoke. The fact that the homes of smokers had two or three times the level nicotine found in the non-smoking households (even when the smoking took place outside) is considered significant by the authors. But the fact remains that even homes lived in entirely by nonsmokers have measurable levels of nicotine and, by Matt's logic, of ETS. Are they also at risk? Is everyone at risk?

Presumably no anti-smoking advocate would claim that a home inhabited by nonsmokers poses a risk to health from firsthand, secondhand or thirdhand smoke. To argue otherwise would be to suggest that risk is universal and inescapable. And yet, 97% of non-smoking homes have measureable quantities of nicotine and the children of nonsmokers have measureable quantities of cotinine. If a nicotine concentration of 0.32 mcg/m3 (ie. a third of a millionth of a gram per cubic metre) suggests the presence of "tobacco toxins", then why should a concentration of 0.10 mcg/m3 be considered safe?

If, as the Surgeon General famously insisted, there is "no safe level of exposure", and if fractions of a microgram represent risk, then even nonsmoking households contain a dangerous level of secondhand smoke. It is a ridiculous notion, but then we are in the realms of the ridiculous.

The common sense answer is that the levels are tiny in the non-smoking households but then they are tiny in the smoking households as well. The cotinine levels of 2 to 3 ng/ml found in the urine of the children of the smokers are extremely low compared to the levels of 300 to 1,500 ng/ml that are typical of smokers. Similarly, while the nicotine level reported in the smokers' homes (0.32 mcg/m3) is slightly higher than that found in the non-smoking homes (0.10 mcg/m3), both are dwarfed by the nicotine levels found in smoky bars (35.5 mcg/m3) and even smoke-free bars (5.95 mcg/m3). According to tobacco control advocates, there is no significant risk for lung cancer below air nicotine levels below 6.95 mcg/m3 ie. 21 times higher than that reported in Georg Matt's 2004 paper.

With levels this low, deeming one safe and one unsafe becomes a matter of faith rather than science and it is fitting that the 2009 paper is tilted 'Beliefs About the Health Effects of "Thirdhand" Smoke and Home Smoking Bans'.

How could 65% of the respondents be aware of thirdhand smoke?

The media attention afforded Georg Matt's 2009 paper implies that ground-breaking research has been carried out. In fact, the study provides just one, rather mundane finding: People who believe that thirdhand smoke is dangerous are more likely to forbid smoking in their homes.

This is hardly earth-shattering news. What is more of a shock is that two-thirds of those surveyed claimed to be concerned about thirdhand smoke. This is odd because, apart from a handful of articles that appeared in the summer of 2006, thirdhand smoke is a new concept to nearly everybody. How, then, were so many people able to be concerned about it?

The answer lies in the question asked in the survey. Thirdhand smoke is not mentioned by name and the concept was not explained to those surveyed. Instead, they were asked the following question:

"Breathing air in a room today where people smoked yesterday can harm the health of infants and children."

Those who agreed with this statement were, as the authors explained, "categorized as holding the belief that thirdhand smoke harms the health of children".

This is rather a leap. The question itself is very vague. It conjures up the image of a smoky room left overnight. The fact that it refers to "people" plural rather than one smoker gives the impression that many cigarettes had been smoked the night before. Considering that the vast majority of respondents agreed that secondhand smoke was hazardous, it is only to be expected that a large number of them would err on the side of caution when dealing with a room in which a number of smokers had congregated the previous evening, particularly when "infants and children" are involved. But this room would be better described as having lingering secondhand smoke rather than "thirdhand smoke".

No mention is made of the more fanciful notion of "tobacco toxins" being carried in from outdoors on smokers' clothes, hairs and fingernails, even though it was this element that captured the attention of the press when the study was reported. Nor were those surveyed informed that the concept they were invited to embrace included a room that had been smoked in "days, weeks and months earlier."

The respondents were not told that the idea of "tobacco toxins" being harmful at ultra-low levels was no more than a "possibility" (in the words of the final study), nor that the researchers themselves referred to thirdhand smoke only as a "concept". If they had been told that the researchers believed that smokers spread disease "through contaminated dust and surfaces, including the frame of an infant's bed and a smoker's finger" it is fair to guess that far fewer of them would have endorsed the theory.

And this is how it was reported in the media...

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The thirdhand smoke gravy train

You shouldn't

Now that the ISIS caliphate has fallen, California has regained the number one spot as the place that is more opposed to the Enlightenment than anywhere else in the world. Like ISIS, Beverly Hills is banning the sale of tobacco and has an insanely draconian smoking ban...

Beverly Hills already has strict regulations on how people smoke. Doing so while standing still, for example, is illegal — if you're going to smoke, you must be walking and continuously moving.

There is a suggestion that parts of California want to ban tobacco sales as a way of banning e-cigarettes, about which hysteria has reached new heights this year. That would certainly be its effect, thanks to US agencies ludicrously defining vaping products as tobacco products.

Facts and science have long been treated with suspicion in the Golden State. I don't know who the woman below is, but she was allowed to give 'evidence' to Beverly Hills city council yesterday in the prohibition debate (where a ban on tobacco sales was passed unanimously). She appears to believe in homeopathy.

"There's not much known about third-hand smoke but it's more dangerous than second-hand smoke" pic.twitter.com/B4Q0ybPee2

— StefanDidak (@StefanDidak) May 8, 2019

She mentions the website thirdhandsmoke.org and I would echo her advice to visit it. It's hilarious. Amongst its comic charms are such articles as 'How my grandfather's cigar damaged his possessions' which explains the basic idea:

Objects that have spent time in the home of someone who smokes are contaminated with thirdhand smoke pollution. Even when there is nothing you can see or smell, items can still be covered with toxic tobacco smoke residue.

Thirdhand smoke residue is sticky, and it stays around for years. It’s also aggressive—it doesn’t simply stay on the object, but it mixes with the air and forms even more toxic substances. Thirdhand smoke can stick to large items in your home, such as furniture, rugs, and window curtains. But it can also stick to other smaller items, such as toys, books, stuffed animals, throw pillows, and television remotes.  When we use the objects, we get exposed to the toxic residue and help spread the thirdhand smoke inside our home because it gets on our skin, hair, and clothing. 

The website promises to provide 'summaries of important research studies related to thirdhand smoke and its effects on human health'. Alas, the 'effects on human health' do not get a look-in (because they are non-existent). Instead, it provides a list of places where trace levels of nicotine have been found, including houses, casinos and hotel rooms.

The whole thing seems designed to appeal to California's legion of hypochondriacs. In the FAQs, smokers are advised to strip, shower and wash their clothes after every cigarette:

When outdoor smokers come inside, the odor they emit is not simply a nuisance. The tobacco smoke odor we smell is a direct sign that a mixture of odorant and odorless tobacco smoke pollutants has been brought into the home on the clothes, skin, hair, and in the exhaled breath of the smoker. Inside the home, the pollutants off-gas into the air, and nonsmokers are now exposed to them through inhalation. In addition, some of these compounds will now adsorb, deposit, and accumulate in the indoor environment even though no cigarettes were smoked indoors. There are three main strategies for preventing tobacco smoke pollutants from clothes and on persons from entering and building up in a home

1) Leave clothes worn while smoking outside the home (e.g., patio, garage).
2) Immediately wash clothes worn while smoking.
3) Ask smokers to wash their hands and shower immediately upon entering the home.

The website is the creation of Georg Matt. Long term readers will recall him as the psychologist who invented the concept of thirdhand smoke in the first place. 'Thirdhand smoke' isn't smoke and it isn't remotely dangerous. It is just the residue of old smoke that you might see on the yellow wallpaper of a heavy smoker.

Way back in 2004, Matt started looking for nicotine and cotinine on household surfaces using highly sensitive instruments. Unsurprisingly, he found more of these substances in the homes of smokers who claimed to smoke outside than in the homes of nonsmokers. But in every case, the nicotine concentrations were tiny. The bedrooms of nonsmokers had nicotine concentrations of 0.09 micrograms per cubic metre (μg/m3) whilst the children of smokers had concentrations of 0.22 μg/m3.

To provide some perspective, an air nicotine concentration of 50μg/m3 would not be uncommon in a bar which allows smoking and the legal limit of workplace exposure in the US is 500 μg/m3.

Matt wrote this up for the journal-comic Tobacco Control and everybody ignored it until the silly season of August 2006 when Matt gave it another media push and generated headlines such as 'Even smoking outside can harm your baby'.

But he had not yet coined the killer term 'thirdhand smoke'. That didn't happen until in 2009 when he published a study with Jonathan Winickoff. The sly genius of that piece of junk science was that it avoided the tricky task of showing that thirdhand smoke presents the slightest danger to health by simply assuming that it does. The study itself was no more than a survey asking people whether they agreed with the following statement:

“Breathing air in a room today where people smoked yesterday can harm the health of infants and children.”

65.2% of nonsmokers agreed, as did 43.3% of smokers. Matt and his team also found that people who agreed with the statement were more likely to ban smoking in their home. They therefore concluded that...

Emphasizing that thirdhand smoke harms the health of children may be an important element in encouraging home smoking bans.

The study did not show that thirdhand smoke actually does harm the health of children - because there was no evidence for that - but the study was published with a suitably incendiary press release and the media fell into line. The BBC, for example, reported it as follows:

Many people are unaware that even smoking away from babies or pregnant women presents a risk, according to US research.

 

Poisons in cigarette smoke can linger on fabrics or hair, but a survey of 1,500 households found that fewer than half of smokers knew this.

You almost have to admire the feral cunning required to pull off this trick. As I said at the time:

It was a masterstroke by Georg Matt and his team. Their greatest weakness was that thirdhand smoke was almost universally unrecognised even as a concept. Worse still, it had not one shred of evidence to support it. Ingeniously, they turned these weaknesses into their strengths. Like the tailors who made the emperor's new clothes, the authors dared the media to admit that they were ignorant of thirdhand smoke and, winning the bluff, blasted the idea into the public consciousness.

The concept of thirdhand smoke was clearly invented to encourage people to stop smoking in their own homes. In truth, it has never really taken off, even among anti-smoking groups like ASH, because most people intuitively know that it is preposterous. The exception is on the West Coast of America where people will believe almost anything. As a result, Matt has carved himself a nice little niche in San Diego where he has continued to produce study after study mining this seam of woo.

And now, thanks to the absolute state of California, he has hit the jackpot.

First Thirdhand Smoke Resource Center in Nation Opens at San Diego State University

The dangers of smoking and secondhand smoke have long been studied, but now the nation’s first public resource center on thirdhand smoke has opened up right here in San Diego.

Researchers with San Diego State University and the University of Southern California opened the Thirdhand Smoke Resource Center on the former’s campus Wednesday.

“There’s a big illusion that when tobacco smoke disappears, we’re safe,” said SDSU psychology professor and director of the resource center, Georg Matt. “Unfortunately, some of the most toxic compounds clinch to surfaces. They get embedded in carpets, they coat walls, they penetrate into walls. They become part of the indoor environment.”

 Needless to say...

The Thirdhand Smoke Resource Center is funded by revenues from a cigarette tax increase approved by California voters in 2016.

Matt has goldplated his theory over the years, moving from an unwarranted assumption that a room is dangerous if someone smoked in it the previous day to the utterly deranged assumption that a room is dangerous if someone smoked, vaped or used chewing tobacco in it weeks, months or years earlier. And yet, if you dig into the FAQs, you will find this crucial admission...

Currently, there is very little information on the unique health effects of THS because research on THS and health have only recently begun.

Only just begun? It's been fifteen years and there is still not a scintilla of evidence that human health is harmed by proximity to a smoker's old armchair.

Still, this new smoker-funded gravy train should provide enough money for Georg Matt to keep carrying out 'research' for the rest of his pointless career.

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The thirdhand smoke grift

More essential public health research from California...

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a number of challenges...

Hasn't it!

...including that many are spending more time at home than ever before. 

Domestic violence, suicide, loneliness, isolation, depression. It is a major problem.

This is a significant problem for those with neighbors who smoke. 

Not so much that, to be honest.

Smoking continues to be a problem in multi-unit housing, and while stay-at-home orders have helped to reduce transmission of COVID-19, they have also increased exposure to secondhand smoke from neighbors. 

It's just one thing after another, isn't it! You think you've dealt with one problem and then a worse problem comes along. Such as, er, wisps of smoke somehow creeping through your walls.

But the problem is more than just secondhand smoke: long after secondhand smoke has cleared, the harmful chemicals in tobacco smoke and e-cigarette vapors remain as thirdhand smoke. The chemicals in thirdhand smoke stick to dust and household surfaces, and can built up over time creating significant reservoirs of thirdhand smoke. 

A nightmare scenario!

Like other household hazards such as lead and allergy-causing dust mites, thirdhand smoke can be incredibly difficult and expensive to completely remove. It can be particularly dangerous for children as they are closer to surfaces where dust gathers such as the floor, they are more likely to put objects or hands in their mouths, and they have weaker immune systems than adults. However, while thirdhand smoke may be difficult to eliminate completely, it is possible to reduce the risk. 

Why do I get the feeling I'm being sold a cleaning product? Is this a press release from Amway?

Potential thirdhand smoke cleaning methods were examined by a group of researchers led by Georg Matt of San Diego State University. The study, "Remediating Thirdhand Smoke Pollution in Multiunit Housing: Temporary Reductions and the Challenges of Persistent Reservoirs," will be published Sept. 15 in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research.

Yes, it's Georg Matt, the San Diego psychologist who has been trying to make 'thirdhand smoke' a thing for 16 years. I first wrote about him before I had this blog. How we laughed and yet he's managed to keep this grift going all that time. Last year, he became the director of the Thirdhand Smoke Resource Center, a state-funded (paid for by smokers) organisation that aims to “make the public more aware of thirdhand smoke”.

According to the press release, traces of nicotine that are measured in parts per billion are now "listed by the State of California as a hazardous chemical". What a world.

So what has this esteemed 'public health' researcher been doing during the pandemic?

Households were split into three groups: the first group received dry/damp cleaning (thorough vacuuming and dusting), followed by wet cleaning (professional carpet/furniture steaming and cleaning of all household linens) a month later. The second group received the opposite, and the third group received both cleaning types on the same day.

Nicotine contamination was immediately reduced in all three groups following cleaning. Regardless of cleaning method, nicotine contamination in all homes increased again during the three months following cleaning, showing that the positive effects of cleaning, while significant in some cases, are temporary.

Matt continued, "We would like to be able to tell residents that there is a simple way to remove this contamination permanently, but that is not what we found. What we can say, as a result of this study, is that there are two important steps you can take to reduce thirdhand smoke contamination and make your home safer."

First, keep household dust as low as possible. Frequent vacuuming of all soft furnishings and floors, and dusting/mopping of all hard surfaces, is the easiest, best way to reduce thirdhand smoke exposure through household dust. Second, keep surfaces that you touch often as clean as possible. Frequently wiping table tops, doors, cabinets, and chairs, and washing pillow cases, blankets, and drapery will help keep our families safe from exposure to thirdhand smoke while we are all staying at home more than ever before. 

Terrific stuff. I quite like the idea of the half-witted hypochondriacs of California obsessively scrubbing every surface of their home to get rid of trace levels of chemicals that are even less dangerous than the cleaning products they're using.

Imbeciles.

You can read the 'study' here if you want. I really can't be bothered.

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Junk scientists wanted

When it comes to tobacco control, it often seems that the policy is decided first and the science is produced as an afterthought. Since the lion's shares of the anti-smoking policies we see today were planned as far back as the 1970s, it is a remarkable coincidence that scientific evidence for each of them appeared at regular and timely intervals in the intervening years. This is something that The Economist gently hinted at in a recent review of a book called Merchants of Doubt:

In most of these campaigns the dissenters have argued that the American scientific establishment is tainted with an anti-corporate liberalism and is trying to impose socialism by the back door. One does not have to agree with this view, or to think that both sides are equally culpable, to feel that the ways in which science is used to generate assent for environmental action may sometimes be as interesting as the ways in which it is mobilised for dissent.

Though the authors note as a curiosity that campaigns against secondary smoke predated evidence that it did any harm, they show no desire to explore this seemingly reversed causality.

 

Secondhand smoke is old news in California these days, of course. These days, if you're an anti-smoking campaigner, your policy objectives are to ban smoking in the home and in the street. These 'next logical steps' have long since been settled on by the people who really matter—ie. you and your fellow 'health professionals'. All you need is a scientific fig-leaf to help you get around the quaint objections of personal liberty and individual sovereignty, which some politicians still consider important and which even you, as a citizen of a liberal democracy, feel compelled to pay lip-service to.

Of course, there isn't any serious scientific evidence that secondhand smoke from outdoors—or from next door—has the slightest effect on the health of others. Nor will there ever be. It would defy everything we know about toxicology, chemistry and biology, not to mention common sense. It's an idea of profound lunacy.

The best of a bad bunch of pseudo-scientific arguments for outdoor smoking bans are the risible notion of people being harmed by trace levels of toxins clinging to clothes and carpets ('thirdhand smoke') and the equally risible idea of cigarette butts leaching trace levels of toxins into the ground, thereby harming...er...something. 

It's not very promising, I'll grant you, but it's all there is and the lack of scientific evidence is holding things up. And so, if you're California's Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program, you wave some money in the air—the traditional mating call of the quackademic—and see who responds. Hence:

TRDRP Call for Applications

Request for Proposals for TRDRP Initiative on Thirdhand Smoke and Cigarette Butts

The Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP) announces a Request for Proposals (RFP) to undertake studies on Thirdhand Smoke and Cigarette Butt Waste, under a new initiative.

And, if you are sitting down...

Approximately $3.75 million is expected to be available for this RFP.

That should get a response from the scientific community in these troubled economic times, wouldn't you say?

The aim of this project is, according to the TRDRP...

...to conduct research on (1) the impact of thirdhand tobacco smoke exposure from indoor surfaces and air quality on public health, and (2) the effects of water and soil contamination by cigarette butts on organisms and humans.

This talk of 'conducting research' makes it sound as if some sort of impartial investigation into science is in the offing here. Tellingly, however, in the 15 page document which gives details about the project, the word 'science' isn't used once. The word 'policy', on the other hand, is used 14 times. That's a pretty good guide to the rest of the document.

They do, however, admit that there is no existing evidence to support either proposition.

The health effects of thirdhand smoke are poorly understood.

Virtually nothing is known about the impact of cigarette butts on contamination of air, water and soil.

Very true. That being the case, you wouldn't want to make any assumption that thirdhand smoke is dangerous, would you?

1.1 Thirdhand Smoke Exposure and Health Effects

The indoor surfaces and air quality component of this initiative is intended to help create and sustain a new research niche and infrastructure in California that is expected to shed light on several concrete aspects of the public health dangers of thirdhand smoke. 

And you wouldn't want to lead the researcher towards a particular conclusion or imply that you're looking for any particular outcome. Would you?

The findings from this research may have broad implications in policy enactment in California to prevent human exposure to thirdhand smoke in homes, hotels, apartment buildings, personal vehicles, gaming casinos, and hookah bars. 

It is anticipated that the research outcomes will contribute to dramatically reducing the exposure of developing and newborn infants, young children, adolescent youth, and adults to potential disease-causing toxicants produced from thirdhand smoke.

And you certainly wouldn't want to suggest that the whole project is specifically designed to meet predetermined political objectives. After all, how could you—the research hasn't even begun yet. Right?

Policy Implications

How will the scientific evidence from exposure to thirdhand smoke and cigarette butt pollution emanating from the proposed collaborative studies inform the policy makers to frame new policy in California to mitigate the public health effects?

How will these studies impact indoor air quality in buildings and vehicles to protect vulnerable populations from exposure risks? Strengths of proposed strategy for investigative plans to interface with policy makers and community advocates will be evaluated by reviewers.

... Funded investigators may be called upon to provide testimony to California legislators and to collaborate with policy researchers to help enact and enforce policies in California to mitigate the health effects of exposure to thirdhand smoke and cigarette butt pollution of water and soil in California.

It sounds a pretty sweet deal—the TRDRP provides the conclusion and the researcher fills in the blanks. All we need is someone prepared to prostitute their scientific integrity for a huge pile of cash. And let's look at all that lovely money again...

The TRDRP has allocated up to $3.75 million over three years for this RFP. It is anticipated that TRDRP may fund up to two (2) Grants of up to $425,000 each, or may fund one (1) Grant of up to $850,000 (including direct and indirect costs) per year for three (3) years to investigate the chemicals, biology and health risk assessment of thirdhand smoke.

What kind of person are we looking for anyway? A project like this would require someone highly trained in toxicology and the physical sciences, no?

A successful application will demonstrate in the Key Personnel a diverse tobacco-related disease and control expertise that is consistent with the proposed aims in the identified two or three themed areas, such as basic, translational and (if applicable) clinical expertise including chemists, biological chemists, cellular and molecular toxicologists...

Fair enough.

...engineers...

Sounds like a job for the great mechanical engineer Stanton Glantz. He's no stranger to a TRDRP handout, plus he lives locally. Get him on the phone.

...physicists, physicians, psychologists...

Psychologists like Georg Matt, for example? He lives nearby too.

...healthcare and tobacco control professionals...

Those three magic words: tobacco control professionals. Gentlemen, the bank is open for business.

...epidemiologists, health economists, statisticians and modeling experts, etc.

Okay, we get it. Pretty much anyone can apply. Fill your boots guys. And just in case your consciences are niggling at you, remember...

Approximately $3.75 million is expected to be available for this RFP.

Okay? Sleep well.

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More thirdhand smoke garbage

Last year I mentioned the TRDRP's multi-million dollar cash bonanza on offer to any scientist prepared to sacrifice their integrity for the ludicrous cause of thirdhand smoke (THS). There has been no shortage of takers, as a study recently published in the American Journal of Physiology indicates:

Methods: Fetal rat lung explants were exposed to nicotine, 1-(N-methyl-N-nitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridinyl)-4-butanal (NNA), or 4-(methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridyl)-1-butanone (NNK), the two main tobacco-specific N-nitrosamine constituents of THS, for 24h...

Conclusion: NNK and NNA exposure resulted in breakdown of alveolar epithelial-mesenchymal cross-talk, reflecting lipofibroblast-to-myofibroblast transdifferentiation, suggesting THS constituents as possible novel contributors to in utero smoke exposure-induced pulmonary damage. These data are particularly relevant for designing specific therapeutic strategies, and for formulating public health policies to minimize THS exposure.

There's nothing like calling for "public health policies" in your conclusion to show that you're a sober and disinterested scientist, is there? This comes from the pen of Virender Rehan and John Torday of UCLA (natch), two serial grant-receivers who have pocketed well over a million dollars from the TRDRP in recent years.

When I saw this abstract, my initial—if cynical—reaction was to assume that the researchers had exposed rats to high doses of  known carcinogens and then acted as if this exposure was in some way comparable to getting a whiff of stale tobacco smoke from an old carpet.

Having now seen the full study, that is pretty much what they did. You see, NNK, NNN and NNA are tobacco-specific nitrosamines which are considered likely candidates for why smoking can cause lung cancer (although NNA is unproven). This is old news, as they acknowledge in their introduction.

The experimenters got some rats' lungs, chopped them up, put them on a petri dish with some penicillin and treated them with NNA and NNK for 24 hours. Varying degrees of lung damage ensued, as you might expect, most of which is far too technical for a layman like me, but we shall assume the experiment was well conducted and that the hypothesis that nitrosamines damage lungs was supported.

Fine. So what's this got to do with so-called thirdhand smoke?

This study was focused on the effects of NNA and NNK as surrogates for THS exposure within the context of our experimental design.

But NNA and NNK are not surrogates for THS exposure. Thirdhand smoke does not pump out these nitrosamines. The only way anyone has even pretended that THS creates nitrosamines was last year's laboratory experiment where nicotine was mixed with nitrous acid. That was an equally quixotic slice of chemistry because but there isn't enough nitrous acid in the air for this reaction to take place in real-life conditions. There wasn't anything technically wrong with that experiment, just as there isn't anything technically wrong with this one, it just didn't have any bearing on what goes on in the real world.

This study of rats' lungs does nothing but tell us, for the umpteenth time, that tobacco-specific nitrosamines cause molecular damage to lungs. It is possible that the results might come in handy in our understanding of the link between smoking and lung cancer but it's got bugger all to do with thirdhand smoke because thirdhand smoke does not cause nitrosamines to enter the lungs in the first place.

So while this expensive piece of research might not have been a complete waste of time if applied to active smoking, it doesn't provide the slightest justification for the American Lung Association to report:

Study: 'Thirdhand smoke' poses danger to young children, pregnant women

I'm picking out the ALA headline because the media did not widely report this study, not even the Daily Mail. Perhaps it's bullshit fatigue setting in, or perhaps the results were too sciencey for them. But while the results are written in such a way as to be impenetrable to all but specialist eyes, the discussion section is written with the clarity and hyperbole of a tabloid editorial. I don't think I have ever seen such a craven attempt to please one's sponsors. For example:

Currently, there is virtually no realization that THS is a danger to human health.

Talk about begging the question. Why would there be "realization" about something that is entirely theoretical and hugely improbable? If you substitute "shred of evidence" for "realization" in this sentence you get nearer the truth.

A recent study by Winickoff et al showed that only 65.2% of non-smokers and 43.2% of smokers believe that THS is harmful to children.

No it didn't. No one who has read that study could honestly interpret the results in that way. As Winickoff himself has admitted (in an e-mail to Rich White):

"Basically, the study found that IF you believe that thirdhand smoke is harmful to infants and children, then you were much more likely to have a home smoking ban."

They continue:

Thus, there is a critical need to validate these projections in real-life situations in the field.

I can heartily agree with that. It's perverse to keep doing these obscure and irrelevant chemistry experiments when it would be so easy to do a randomised control trial. Get a bunch of rats and stick half of them in a cage with a shirt borrowed from a smoker and see how they get on. If they drop dead I will personally donate £1,000 to the charity of your choice. Fair?

Thirdhand smoke is a stealth toxin because it is present in the households of smokers where small children and elderly people live, the hotel rooms, casinos and cars owned by smokers, and where the unsuspecting vulnerable populations may be exposed to the toxicants without realizing the dangers.

It's actually quite sad to see scientists reduced to having to write this drivel just to please their employers. If it wasn't for the fact that their work will be used to make children scared of hugging their grandparents and to get smokers kicked out of their homes, I could almost feel sorry for them.

Because THS is essentially aged SHS that is adherent to surfaces, has smaller sized ultrafine particles, but much larger sized molecular weight moieties with greatly heightened asthma hazard index values, it is likely to be much more toxic that MSS [mainstream smoke] and fresh SSS [sidestream smoke].

I've long wondered whether some of these California secondhand smoke "researchers" would be practising homeopathy if tobacco control's loot hadn't come their way. Certainly the idea that secondhand smoke is more dangerous than firsthand smoke relies on the wacky principles of homeopathy. That belief—widely shared on the internet—revolves around a simple confusion between secondhand smoke and sidestream smoke; I've written about this at length. Similarly, the idea that THS, which isn't smoke at all, is more toxic than cigarette smoke has more than a touch of woo about it.

The same risk exists for adult workers who clean and change bed sheets in hotel rooms where cigarette smoking is allowed the world over, especially in China and other countries in Africa, Asia, South America and North America - a problem of global proportions!

I'd like to think that the exclamation mark has a touch of sarcasm to it, as if they're letting the reader know that they don't believe this utter bilge any more than he does. Alas, I fear it may actually have been added to emphasise what a pair of Gallileos these two characters are.

And that's about it. I'm off on holiday tomorrow so things will be quiet round here for a week but I've got an article going up on The Free Society next week so keep an eye on that. Cheery bye!

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Thirdhand smoke - the bogeyman California deserves

For a bit of light entertainment, let's see what's happening in California...

 

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended our lives, turning our homes into offices, classrooms and gyms to protect us from the deadly coronavirus. The pandemic has also disrupted the time-honored real estate rituals of open houses and in-person home tours, and we are now using virtual tours and other “non-touch” experiences to find a new home. Buying a home or renting an apartment based on a virtual tour may be a positive development for the real estate industry, but consumers need to know what they may miss in a virtual-only experience.

 

And what is that?

Most notably, a virtual tour cannot tell us much about hazardous chemical substances in that home: pollutants in the indoor air, in the walls and built-in furniture, and on surfaces.

 

I suppose so. And if I told you that the author is our old friend, Georg Matt, director of the taxpayer-funded Thirdhand Smoke Resource Center, you can probably guess which 'pollutants' are on his mind.

A common source of indoor pollution is contamination from toxic chemicals in tobacco and marijuana smoke and electronic cigarette vapor. 

 

Here comes the science...

 

In a recent study of 220 apartments in San Diego County, we found nicotine residue in every unit, even homes of nonsmokers with strict smoking bans.

 

Wow! It seems that no one is safe and everyone is at risk. Quick, give Dr Matt some more money!

 

In about 10% of homes of nonsmokers, we found levels of toxic tobacco residue as high as levels typically seen in homes of active indoor smokers.

 

Seems unlikely, to be honest. Are sure your equipment's working properly?

 

Secondhand smoke contains a mixture of many different chemicals, and while we may no longer be able to detect secondhand smoke in the air after a few hours, its toxic chemicals stick to and linger in carpets, furniture, walls and ventilation systems. Over weeks, months and years of repeated smoking, these chemicals can become embedded in materials and remain in these reservoirs long after smokers have moved out. This chemical residue, also known as thirdhand smoke, includes numerous toxic substances listed under California’s Proposition 65 known to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm.

Probably. Prop 65 is notorious for including so many chemicals that virtually everything has to be labelled with a warning in California. 

With modern technology you can find trace levels of almost anything if you try hard enough. That's why 'toxins' found in tobacco smoke can be found in the homes of people who don't smoke and don't allow smoking. What is always forgotten in screwball states like California is that the dose makes the poison. 

First, we call for a comprehensive smoking ban in all multi-unit housing.

 

Of course you do. 

Second, we call for accurate disclosure of past smoking (including e-cigarettes and marijuana) in real estate transactions and rental contracts. For the benefit of buyers, renters, sellers, apartment managers and Realtors, we ask the California Department of Real Estate to provide education and require disclosure regarding tobacco, electronic cigarette and marijuana use in real estate transactions and for the Department of Consumer Affairs to require the same in lease agreements. Similarly, we ask the California Association of Realtors to update its seller property questionnaire to include questions about how long, how much and where tobacco products were used on a property.

 

That's just what California needs - more utterly pointless bureaucracy. 

 

Third, we call for environmental testing of thirdhand smoke toxic substances to certify homes as free of toxic thirdhand smoke residue. Such testing could allow a seller to advertise a property as free of toxic thirdhand smoke residue or alert the seller to the need to clean up the toxic legacy to provide a safe home for the next occupant. Scientifically proven thirdhand smoke testing methods for homes already exist but need to be made more affordable and accessible to consumers.

I wonder if there are any 'thirdhand smoke' 'experts' with the appropriate equipment who could deliver this service for a price? 

This is one of the grifts of the century.

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Worthless research into thirdhand smoke

There's a wacky psychologist over in San Diego called Georg Matt who has been pushing the concept of 'thirdhand smoke' for a decade. Thirdhand smoke is the ludicrous name for any measurable deposits of nicotine found in hair, clothing, carpets and furniture. It is not smoke and it is not in the least bit dangerous, but in chemophobic California the mere presence of CHEMICALS is enough to start a panic.

Readers with long memories will fondly recall Matt getting headlines around the world with a study of zero academic merit in 2009 when he conducted a phone interview asking parents if they were concerned about thirdhand smoke. Since Matt had just invented the concept, most of them were obviously not concerned about it, but the gullible media (eg. the BBC) still reported the 'news' as he hoped... 

Many people are unaware that even smoking away from babies or pregnant women presents a risk, according to US research.

You have to take your hat off to the way Matt played journalists with this study. His research never found any 'risk' from thirdhand smoke and this set the pattern for all the research that has come after it (and there has been plenty because the cranks of California hived out millions of dollars from smokers to pay for a Thirdhand Smoke Research Consortium). There has never been any real attempt to show actual harm from the smell of tobacco on an old sofa because there is none.

It's a simple process. Modern technology can detect chemicals at the tiniest of trace levels. All the activist-researchers have to do is report that scary-sounding chemicals have been identified and the media lap it up. You don't need to find evidence of harm if journalists are going to infer it.

Matt has been at it again in the latest issue of the amusing comic Tobacco Control. His latest study should be a set text in any course on junk science. He took samples from 25 kids who showed up at a hospital to see if their hands contained traces of nicotine or cotinine (cotinine is a biomarker for nicotine). 18 of them lived with a smoker and all of them had what Matt calls 'potentially SHS-related complaints' (SHS is secondhand smoke and a potentially SHS-related complaint is pretty much everything except a broken leg in California).

So what did he find? It turns out that all of the kids - every single one of them - had detectable levels of nicotine on their hands. All but one of them had detectable levels of cotinine.

Given that cotinine is a biomarker for nicotine it seems likely that something went wrong with the test they did on the one kid who had traces of nicotine but no traces of cotinine. Although Matt claims that 'nicotine is specific to tobacco', both nicotine and cotinine are found in various common vegetables. Matt's little experiment shows nothing more than that cool technology can find nanograms of nicotine on anybody. As his study notes, 'Reported smoking behaviour [of the parents] was not correlated with nicotine or cotinine.'

The fact that these kids were showing up to hospital is irrelevant. It tells us nothing since Matt doesn't bother to assemble a control group of kids who are not showing up to hospital. Even if he had, it wouldn't have told us anything about the health impact of mythical thirdhand smoke.

Indeed, it's pretty difficult to see what conclusion we are supposed to come to after reading this study. Matt emphasises the supposedly interesting finding that nicotine levels were 'higher than expected'. Previous studies have found levels of 25 nanograms per wipe on adults who live with smokers whereas he found an average of 86 nanograms per wipe (for reference, smokers have around 650 ng/wipe on their hands). But even this finding seems to be due to his team wiping a different part of the hand to previous researchers:

Another limitation is that we may have found higher-than-expected nicotine levels, because we wiped the insides of children’s entire hands (ie, palm and volar aspect of fingers). Our ongoing research now includes hand surface area measurements so that we can compare new findings with our previous work.

To make his research seem worthwhile, Matt invents the concept of OTS which stands for Overall Tobacco Smoke and says...

Our findings indicate that children carry tobacco smoke toxicants on their hands, even when nobody around them is smoking. Thus, nicotine and other THS compounds on children’s hands may contribute to OTS, independent of SHS.

The invention of OTS doubles down on the patently false claim that trace residues are 'smoke', and the use of the word 'toxicants' is designed to imply evidence of harm where there is none. Elsewhere in the study he makes the homeopathic claim that 'there is concern that THS may be more toxic than SHS'. Insofar as there is 'concern', it mostly comes from Georg Matt who cites himself no fewer than nine times in the study's 16 references.

This is a study that tells us nothing about a non-existent health threat. Its only purpose is to keep the concept of thirdhand smoke going and to keep the grant money rolling in.  

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The thirdhand smoke grift continues

Third-hand smoke is the health scare that really never took off but won't quite die. That's mainly thanks to the persistence of psychologist Georg Matt who managed to get hold of a stack of cash from the Californian government to set up the laughable Thirdhand Smoke Resource Centre.

Matt is back with yet another study today... 

 

Almost all kids have tobacco on their hands, even in non-smoking homes

Young children touch everything - carpets, tabletops, toys, clothes, etc. - and then touch their mouths and faces. This makes them especially vulnerable to thirdhand smoke, the chemical residue from tobacco smoke left behind in dust and on surfaces after someone smokes or vapes.

 

How does their health suffer when they encounter this terrifying substance? Alas, the researchers don't say.

 

A team of researchers from San Diego State University and the University of Cincinnati used a novel method of swabbing the hands of children 11 years of age and younger to measure the levels of nicotine present, an indicator of thirdhand smoke exposure. 

More than 97% of the 504 children in the study had some level of nicotine present on their hands. More surprisingly, more than 95% of children in non-smoking households and home smoke bans still had nicotine on their hands.

 

This is a tribute to the incredible sensitivity of whatever they're using to pick up these tiny traces of nicotine.

 

The researchers plan to continue analyzing other markers of thirdhand smoke exposure and investigate health outcomes. They hope their research will further support stricter smoking bans, remediation practices, and policies requiring real estate agents and landlords to disclose thirdhand smoke levels in homes.

 

Nothing screams 'serious science' like the researchers telling you what policy objectives they hope to achieve by doing it!

 

Great use of taxpayers' money.

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Thirdhand smoke roundup

An extended version of my article about the thirdhand smoke study is on the Free Society website today. Quick summary: they used 14 times as much nitrous acid and 15 times as much nicotine as would be found in a normal home to produce a few nanograms of a substance that isn't a carcinogen. Apart from that, great study.

Meanwhile, it's been interesting to see what the reaction has been to the whole story in the press and on the blogs.

Some fell for it hook, line and sinker. Bro WTF? thinks...

So not only do smokers ruin my ability from wearing [sic] my same “go-to” outfit two nights in a row amongst two separate groups of people because my clothes now smell like an incinerator, smokers are killing me long after they leave a room.

Live Well! is not alone in seizing on thirdhand smoke as another excuse to tax smokers...

I say raise cigarette taxes! Not only is it good for our health, it will be good for the states who will receive more tax revenue that they desperately need for school systems, roads, and other infrastructure projects.

Honors e/e genuinely seems to be worried by the threat and wants to go further than mere taxation... 

Until I read this I always felt like if people want to smoke they should be able to it was not hurting me and if I did not want to be around it I could walk away, but now I am not so sure. This study shows that not only are smokers hurting themselves but they are also hurting people who come into a building, get in a car, or visit there [sic] house after they have been smoking. If tobacco is so harmful to everyone maybe it should be ban [sic].

Woman's Day says smokers should take a few precautions...

If you still insist on smoking, smoke outdoors only. Just make sure you take a shower and wash your clothes afterwards—at least you can help protect someone else’s health.

See? Is that so much to ask?

A member of an Indiana anti-smoking group can't separate cause from effect but she has her own story to tell at the Star Press...

Then, last year, I became a victim of third-hand smoke -- the residual toxins that linger on the hair, skin and clothing of smokers. I had come into contact with a couple who smoked and their clothing had the strongest stench of tobacco I had ever experienced. Being a previous smoker myself, I know that smokers don't realize how awful they smell and many times try to cover up the signs of smoking by using sprays and colognes (which) only make it worse.

The result of my contact with third-hand smoke was initially a sinus headache, then coughing. I ended up using a week's worth of vacation time because I developed what is called community acquired pneumonia.

John Banzhaf of ASH (for it is he) takes some dodgy science and exaggerates it still further:

Interestingly, another very recent study shows that nicotine exhaled into the air is converted by other common indoor air pollutants into cancer-causing chemicals which can linger on clothing, furniture, draperies, etc. -- a new risk being termed "thirdhand smoke."

The risk could be comparable to that of smoking.

Check that last line. Good grief.

Back on planet Earth, and on Spiked, Rob Lyons thinks differently:

Yet even the junk science of secondhand smoke seems like the stuff of Nobel Prizes next to the new kid on the block: ‘third-hand smoke’. Now, claim researchers, you don’t even need to breathe smoke in, you simply need to be in contact with smokers or touch surfaces that have been in contact with their smoke to be at risk. If the dodgy research that produced the smoking ban was bullshit, the claims made for third-hand smoking are in a whole new category: ‘beyond bullshit’.

At The Examiner, Thomas McAdam was showing signs of - shock, horror - having actually read the study:

His “study” did not involve any clinical trials with actual human beings (or even actual mice or rats). He and his student assistants simply applied tobacco smoke to sheets of cellulose as a model indoor material, and determined that TSNAs detected on cellulose surfaces were 10 times higher than those originally present in the sample. That is, after spraying the cellulose sheets with nitrous acid.

And he has some information about the study's funding source:

Before you jump to the conclusion that Dr. Hugo is some sort of moron, you need to know about California’s Proposition 99. In November 1988, California voters approved Prop. 99, “The Tobacco Tax and Health Protection Act”, which instituted a 25¢-per-pack cigarette surtax. Part of this tax revenue is deposited into a Research Account, to be appropriated for research on tobacco-related disease, by the TRDRP. For the bizarre little study we have outlined above, Dr. Hugo Destaillats was awarded $704,901.00 by TRDRP and the taxpaying smokers of California. Maybe Dr. Hugo’s not such a moron after all.

And, finally, he points out that not only are people prepared to believe anything they're told, they're already hunting out fresh scares for themselves:

Within months, the neologism “third-hand smoke” was getting more than 3 million references in a Google search. (Interestingly, the term “fourth-hand smoke”—the theory that you can get cancer from simply watching a movie in which Humphrey Bogart is smoking—is now getting 56,600 Google references.) Stay tuned.

We'll leave the last word to Andrew Button at The Muse:

The point at which your activism goes from being an attempt to protect people from harm to a plot to make life harder for people with a weakness, is the point you should probably call it quits.

The thing is, big anti-tobacco is a thriving business, and they’re not going to stop on their own...

The anti-smoking movement of today is less about health, and more about discriminating against and controlling people.
Anti-smoking activists want a nanny state that protects people from themselves, and punishes behavior some people find aesthetically unappealing.

The state should not have the power to regulate what it doesn’t like arbitrarily, unless that behavior poses a real risk to other people.

Until people realize this, anti-smoking legislation is only going to get more restricting and oppressive

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Quack claims about vaping, smoking and pets

Two articles today help bring a mad year to an end with some suitably dire science. The first will ensure that thousands of people keep smoking rather than switch to e-cigarettes, thanks to a widely reported quote from the lead researcher...

"I believe they [e-cigarettes] are no better than smoking regular cigarettes." 

No such conclusion can be drawn from the study itself which looked at what happens to human cells exposed to vapour extract in a petri dish. Cell damage took place but it is unclear what this means for vapers (if anything). As the press release says...

She [the lead author] notes that cells in the lab are not completely comparable to cells within a living person. The cells lines that scientists work with have been "immortalized because of certain cell changes," she says. So it could be that e-cigarette vapor has different effects than those seen in the lab.

Also, her team didn't seek to mimic the actual dose of vapor that an e-cigarette user would get. 

Moreover, there was no attempt to compare the effect with that of smoking but there is a clear indication in study's text that cigarette smoke is far more damaging...

Treatment media was replaced every three days with 1% e-cigarette extract. Because of the high toxicity of cigarette smoke extract, cigarette-treated samples of each cell-line could only be treated for 24 hours. 

 
You can read an excellent critique of this research here.

Elsewhere today, the Telegraph features this 'story' on its front page...

Pets at more risk from passive smoking than humans, find scientists 

For players of bullshit bingo, this article offers up a full house. Tiny sample size? Check. Unpublished research? Check. Data-dredging? Check. Mention of 'thirdhand smoke'? Check.

There are so many gems in the article, but this stands out...

The team said pets could even be at greater risk of health problems because of their low height and more likely to inhale ‘third hand’ smoke particles which are thought to be even more carcinogenic than ‘second hand smoke.’ 

Utter wibble. Insofar as 'thirdhand smoke' exists at all (it means residual staining from indoor smoking, ie. it is not smoke), there is no evidence of any carcinogenic effect whatsoever. Since smoke rises, having a 'low height' would actually make animals less likely to inhale secondhand smoke. This being so, the researchers resort to claiming that cats are at greater risk from licking supposed toxins off their fur.

“Furthermore as pets self-groom they will ingest the smoke particles from their fur – this is a big problem for cats as they are very fastidious and thorough about their self-grooming These factors mean that pets are probably exposed to greater amounts of passive smoke.” 

It's not smoke and the study does not measure harm at all. It's difficult to tell exactly what it does measure since 'the research is still ongoing and is expected to be published next year', but the study appears to have done nothing more than measure levels of nicotine in pets' fur and make absurd extrapolations from them. The hilarious claim that 'household cats are more susceptible to cancer than dogs when living with smokers' is based on nothing more than the observation that cats lick themselves more than dogs. The study didn't look at passive smoke and it didn't look at cancer. Hold the front page!

There is the small problem - unmentioned in any of the media coverage - that scientists have conspicuously failed to induce lung cancer in animals even when exposing them to vast quantities of tobacco smoke. They finally managed it in the late 1960s by using the patently unnatural method of giving dogs tracheotomies but the failure to induce cancer by putting animals in extremely smoky environments has generally been attributed to the stubborn insistence of animals to breathe through their nose (among other factors).

Lab experiments could be - and have been - conducted to put the claims made today to the test. We don't need silly assumptions and guesswork based on nicotine concentrations.

The unpublished research (involving 79 pets) also contains a humdinger that sums up the desperate state of things as 2015 draws to a close...

...dogs living with a smoker owner gained more weight after neutering than those in a non-smoking household. 

So passive smoking causes weight gain in dogs but only if they have been castrated! Never mind that smoking itself does not cause weight gain in humans - on the contrary, it is associated with lower body weight. Never mind, too, that there is no obvious reason why having working testicles should protect dogs from this counter-intuitive effect.

The study didn't even observe weight gain in the castrated, passive smoking mutts; the claim is based on the researchers finding that 'a gene that acts as a marker of cell damage was higher in dogs living in smoking homes than those that did not.'

In sum, we have researchers claiming that tobacco smoke, which is associated with weight loss when consumed in large quantities by humans, is associated with weight gain when consumed in trace quantities by dogs. Alas, there is no word yet on how it affects the girth of cats.

Professor Knottenbelt is hoping that the findings will help smokers understand the impact they have on their pets and give them an incentive to either stop smoking full stop or restrict the habit to outside the home. 

You don't say! 

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Thirdhand smoke: the lie that won't die

Bizarrely, the Daily Mail has today decided to resurrect the thirdhand smoke myth...

Is that nasty ash-tray tang that lingers on car-seat fabric, curtains in homes and the clothes of the nicotine addict strong enough to damage other people's health?

No.

According to some experts, third-hand smoke, as it is known, is as dangerous to health as the fumes billowing directly from a pipe or cigarette, particularly for babies and children.

Actually, no experts have ever said that because there is no evidence whatsoever for it. They have only surmised that people might be less inclined to smoke in their house if they believed that 'thirdhand smoke' killed.

The warning came from a paper produced in the respected journal Paediatrics earlier this year.

Much, much earlier this year. At the start of January in fact, and it was thoroughly debunked at the time, even by the Mail's own columnists, so why on earth is the Mail reporting it nine months later?

I won't go into the reasons why 'thirdhand smoke' is such a silly scare, as I have done so before. See Beyond Belief.

It must be a very slow news day.

(Note for those outside the UK: The Daily Mail is notorious for peddling health scares. A full list of all the things it says cause cancer can be seen at the excellent Kill or Cure? website.)

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Banning smoking in the home: Winickoff returns

Remember Dr Jonathan Winickoff? Early last year, he staked his claim as a rising star of quackademia by popularising the phantom menace of thirdhand smoke using nothing more than a phone survey. 

Would you stop smoking if you believed that toxins clung to your clothes and killed your children? You would? Cool! In that case, thirdhand smoke exists—let's send a press release; the BBC and the Daily Mail will fall for it. 

That's about the level of this guy's scientific integrity.

This utter, utter junk science was designed to further the 'next logical step' of banning smoking in the home and now, 18 months on, Winickoff has got down to brass tacks and published a call-to-arms in the New England Journal of Medicine. 

As is happening with terrifying regularity these days, the whole study is beyond parody. Basically, he wants smoking banned in all public housing on the basis that deadly levels of secondhand smoke travel down air vents and through walls. This is a man for whom 'the dose makes the poison' means absolutely nothing. (But then Winickoff's a paediatrician, not a toxicologist; his two co-authors—Michelle Mello and Mark Gottlieb—are both lawyers.)

The very fact that this garbage has been published in a respected journal like the NEJM is too depressing for words, but a few things about its basic premise need to be mentioned.

A resident who smokes in a single unit within a multiunit residential building puts the residents of the other units at risk.

This is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. Just two references are provided to support it. One points to the Surgeon General's report Children and Secondhand Smoke Exposure. The other is a transcript of a Surgeon General's press conference on the same subject. Both encourage parents not to smoke in the home (for the sake of the children), but neither of them make any scientific claim that smokers in one apartment harm people in surrounding homes.

Tobacco smoke can move along air ducts, through cracks in the walls and floors, through elevator shafts, and along plumbing and electrical lines to affect units on other floors.

How can the NEJM print such rubbish? 

Firstly, if you have a crack in the wall big enough to let in air from next door, you have bigger problems to worry about that secondhand smoke. 

Secondly, air ducts don't carry air from apartment to apartment, they take air in and out of the building. Likewise the plumbing.

Thirdly, tobacco smoke coming down electrical lines? We really are in the realms of the insane now, are we not? Last month, Smokles ran a contest to find "the most ludicrous article to appear in an anti-tobacco journal in the next 6 months." I submitted the following:

Toxins from cigarettes can be transmitted down phone lines

That's got to be close enough, no? Gentlemen, I claim my five dollars.

Winickoff gives three references here: this, this and this. None of them support his claims about cracks in the walls, electrical lines or anything else.

High levels of tobacco toxins can persist in the indoor environment long after the period of active smoking — a phenomenon known as third-hand smoke.

This is bullshit of Winickoff's own making and, of course, he provides a reference to his own phone survey study as evidence (this is how 'overwhelming' evidence accumulates—see Glantz). He also refers to the Georg Matt study and two other studies. None of these papers suggest that lingering tobacco toxins ever reach "high levels"—on the contrary, they are infinitesimally low—and none of them discuss secondhand smoke travelling between apartments.

These are the key statements upon which Winickoff hangs his case. There is not a shred of evidence for any of them. Isn't the peer-review process supposed to check these things?

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