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Brilio.net/en - While the whole world is still trying to ban smoking through various campaigns for the past decades, there are official studies that proved it might not be as urgent as everyone makes it out to be. It is commonly believed that lung cancer and heart attack are health risks for passive smoke inhalers, or otherwise known as secondhand smokers or environmental tobacco smoke (ETS). This had been the major push shouted all over the world for decades.
In this article is the data gathered by Membunuh Indonesia, Indonesian website that warns people of the terrors that are threatening Indonesias industries in many aspects. This might gain more contradictive response from public but in fact the anti-tobacco campaign has finally taken its toll for Indonesian cigarette companies, as they had to close their factories recently. Tobacco has been one of Indonesias biggest agro products and the companies have been operating for many years. The closing of several factories is a direct result from anti-tobacco campaigning, and this has concerned some Indonesians who view it as mass propaganda to destroy local industries.
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Victoria MacDonald, a health correspondent, gave out contradictive facts that said there is no correlation whatsoever found between the passive smokers and the risk of lung cancer. She wrote it in her article Passive Smoking Doesnt Cause Cancer Official in the UK Sunday Telegraph, March 8, 1998.
The study conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in seven European countries is one of the biggest studies ever done by the WHO with samples from people who were around smokers in workplaces, houses or in the neighborhood. The study result became a slap to the WHO that had been actively campaigning for anti-tobacco legislations, because there is no statistic proof that secondhand smokers face increases risk of lung cancer.
The Telegraph noted that: There was no association between lung cancer risk and ETS exposure during childhood. While Robert A. Levy and Rosalind B. Marimont in their writing Lies, Damned Lies, & 400,000 Smoking-related Deaths in the Regulation, Vol. 21, No. 4 Year 1998 called it as failed to scientifically prove that there is an association between passive smoking and a number of diseases, lung cancer in particular.
The WHO had denied the study result by releasing a report in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute on October 1998, saying there is an increase of 1.16 to 1.17 point for passive smokers. This ratio number is still considered small because it is still below 2, and based on the guideline released by National Cancer Institute statistically insignificant. This made the WHOs report on passive smokers risk to cancer lung 8 times smaller than the risk to cancer lung for those who regularly drink fat milk, which is 2.4.
James E. Enstrom and Geoffrey C. Kabat conducted another research on Californian in the USA about the same topic and the result showed no correlation between the environmental tobacco smokers with the death rate caused by heart attack or lung cancer. This proved that the possible number of passive smokers to get heart attack is much smaller than the originally it was believed to be. They made this report in Environmental Tobacco Smoke and Tobacco Related Mortality In A Prospective Study of Californians in 1960-1998.
Smoking or consuming tobacco has been related to be the cause of fatal heart disease but researchers are still trying to find its main cause and the cure. As reported by Aisling Irwin on Study Casts Doubt On Heart Risk Factors article published in The Telegraph, on August 25, 1998, said that the biggest cardiology study ever conducted failed to find correlation between heart attacks and classic risk factors such as smoking and high cholesterol levels.
In the MONICA (Multinational MONItoring of Trends and Determinants in CArdiovascular Disease) Study, a project started in the 1980s for more than 10 years in 21 countries with 10 millions of men and women aged 25-64 years as samples, researchers could not find a statistic connection between heart disease reduction with the changes in obesity, smoking, blood pressure level or cholesterol level. The result of study was announced in the European Congress of Cardiology in Vienna, August 1998.
The worlds longest and largest study gathered information from 150,000 of heart attacks data from West Europe, Russia, Iceland, Canada, China and Australia. The biggest heart disease number decreased in Sweden, while increased in Lithuania, Poland, China and Russia.
Moreover, the study research discovered that anxiety, poverty, economic and social changes do have impacts heart attack. The fact showed that even if a person had stopped smoking, but the stress caused from losing a house would cause a heart attack. There are surely other factors that have risks for the disease, such as lifestyle, exercise and diet. So implementing healthy lifestyle will definitely help to lower the risks to fatal diseases.
(brl/red)
