Figures lie; liars figure

Lex responds to misinformation in the Ft. Wayne Journal Gazette aka The Daily Punctilio (From Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events) :

Not that the editor of this page would care but, there was a significant error in a letter submitted by Yecenia Tostado in Sunday’s letters section. Ms. Tostado wrote “The American Cancer Society states that ‘secondhand smoke is the third leading preventable cause of death in the U.S. killing 38,000 to 65,000 non-smokers every year.”

The following comes directly from the ACS web page: (http://www.cancer.org/docroot/PED/content/PED_10_2X_Secondhand_Smoke-Clean_Indoor_Air.asp):

“Secondhand smoke can be harmful in many ways. In the United States alone, each year it is responsible for:

- an estimated 35,000 to 40,000 deaths from heart disease in people who are not current smokers (Emphasis added)

- about 3,000 lung cancer deaths in nonsmoking adults”

In the first bullet, one might conclude that the 35,000 to 40,000 deaths in people who “are not current smokers” at one time were smokers. If that’s the case, wouldn’t it make more sense to blame the death on firsthand rather than secondhand smoke? Also notice the deaths are attributed to heart disease.

So if I’m a 68 year old who weighs 600 pounds and smoked a couple of packs cigarettes a day up until 2 years ago, and am married to a smoker, when I die of a heart attack, because I'm a "current non-smoker" married to a smoker, the ACS will attribute my death to secondhand smoke, rather than the proximate cause of my death - my obesity, cigarette smoking and relative longevity.

The figure in the second bullet looks familiar. Oh Yeah, that’s the figure I used in my letter, which is the accepted high figure of deaths attributable to secondhand smoke from an EPA study on the subject.

The Surgeon General’s figure (50,000) quoted in Ms. Tostado's letter is equally misleading. But hey, it’s easy to throw big numbers out there – 650,000 deaths in Iraq. It’s much harder to do the work required to get it right in 300 words or less. END OF LETTER

The point of my letter was not that smoking is a wonderful thing. The point was that the county government has no business telling people how to run their business with regard to cigarette smoking, which the last time I looked is a legal product.