Saturday 1 December 2012

80% of those who get lung cancer today are         

NON - SMOKERS

One example of pictorial anti-smoker propaganda 

(The Black Lung Myth)

This is NOT a comparison of smokers/non-smokers lungs!

“Chris Watson, vice-president of the British Transplantation Society (BTS), 
told CNN that 49 percent of last year's lung donors in the UK were smokers.” (Dec 2009)




US Cancer specialist Lynne Eldridge MD: “Nearly 80% of people diagnosed with lung cancer now, in 2012, are non-smokers. All of the anti-smoking campaigns imaginable are not going to make a difference for this 80%.”


I have been banging on this drum for several years, trying to raise awareness of the massive increases in lung cancer (and many other so called ‘smoking related’ diseases) and its inverse relationship to the massive reduction in smoking; Before this one, {my latest blog on the subject}


Until recently, the anti-smoker response to increasing levels of cancers was to ‘adjust’ the raw statistics presumably in the hope that the reduction in smoking would eventually result in a reduction of cancers. It hasn’t happened! Now, Finally, after being mooted for years, lung cancer ‘experts’ are coming clean (well almost!) and are making subtle, tentative step towards informing an anti-smoker induced, dumbed down public, of the truth (sort of!)- but it has taken decades, and the loss of many lives. 


Lung cancer (LC) experts must eventually have realised that perpetuating the fallacy that LC is ‘smoking related’ has only served to keep valuable research funding away from their speciality area, exacerbating and intensifying the problem of LC.  Until recently, LC research could only attract 5% of medical research funding, despite it being the #1, biggest cancer killer in most developed countries, where the ‘puritanistic’ smoking prohibition agenda is also the most advanced. How was perpetuating the myth, that LC was a ‘self inflicted’ smokers disease or the the cure was as easy as quitting smoking, ever going to have any other result?  The problem is how to break this information (that is being exposed anyway) to the public,  without admitting that the decades long smoking campaign has been nothing more than a deception to divert attention away from real causes where medical science is impotent to effect any suitable prevention/cure. 


This is the first time, that I am aware of that LC experts, specifically, have spilled the beans on LC / Smoking, but they clearly only want to break this quietly and hence, probably the reason why my comment on their story was removed (see below). It is not however, the first time it has been acknowledged. The WHO/UN summit on ‘non-communicable’ diseases was one of the first, (implied but never expressly admitted) by attempting to re-define ‘smoking related’ diseases and to divert blame from smoking to other lifestyle choices (while continuing to ignore the real probable causes)


This trend (Cancers increasing/smoking reducing) should have been identified years ago by any ‘expert’ in the cancer field or who's job it is/was to monitor and identify such mortality/morbidity trends. One can only speculate as to why it has taken so long to make it available to the public, but I suspect that well crafted anti-smoker propaganda, much of it well established before the present generation of ‘experts’ were even born, can affect impartial ‘experts’ as much as anyone else - if not more-so. The present generation of medical/scientific professionals were spoon fed this propaganda from birth, through school, university and all through their specialist training by their apparently well respected, intelligent mentors. Of course, lung cancer is the ‘flagship’ cause of smoking, long established by the anti-smoker lobby as ‘settled science’ - denying this and in so doing criticizing their eminent predecessors must be an unpalatable task in their eyes. In addition, the medical scientific professions have been held to ransom by a ruthless $billion tobacco CONTROL industry, using tactics more suited to mafia gang culture. Scientists who fail to fully fall into line behind the anti-smoker regime and pseudo science will find themselves subjected to smear tactics and as good as exiled from their profession (eg Professors Rylander, Enstrom & Kabat). Doctors who fail to pass on anti-smoker propaganda expressly and continuously to their patients, could find themselves fighting an anti-smoker legal challenge for negligence or malpractice - John Banzhaff explains how to blackmail the medical profession etc into compliance by exploiting legal process.
Time to be truthful to the public; Time to attack lung cancer rather than smokers; Time to starve the destructive anti-smoker agenda of funds and use the money saved to prevent the rising tally of non-smoker and smoker deaths. Time for the medical/scientific community to attempt to regain some trust.


**

My comment that initially appeared (at #10) before being deemed unsuitable for the 'about.com lung cancer' website and removed - 29/11/12;


Sorry ‘lungcancer’ (pseudonym of contributor of comments:-) (8)&(9), but David Copeland is correct and you are obfuscating! Unless you are saying that it is QUITTING smoking that causes Lung cancer - ie. smoking protects against lung cancer? Which is not as daft as it sounds  (It only sounds daft because of decades of anti-smoker propaganda.)

The whole case for smoking/lung cancer was based on the 1950s correlation between the increase in smoking cigarettes * (note 1 below) and increase in lung cancer since the beginning of the century, more specifically since the 1st world war. NOW, the correlation is an inverse one and has been for several years. Smoking prevalence has been reducing for 60 + years but LC continues to increase. More and more people are dying. ALL HARD science (ie. not epidemiological ‘science’ but experimental, empirical science) to link smoking with lung cancer failed. (despite many years of trying) 
Now it is finally being accepted that all the promises that quitting smoking would save so many lives has proved to have been WRONG! Diverting attention away from this, deceives people and denies ethical science funds to find causes/cures


Who should be held responsible for this? When will anti-smoker fanatics, and those who could put this right but continue to close their eyes to it all, be called to account?


*1) Before cigarettes, tobacco pipe smoking had been a mass pursuit for centuries. It is not a coincidence that the 17th century was known as the ‘age of the pipe’. In London alone it was reported that there were 7000 places vending (selling) tobacco in early C17th, yet the cancer ‘epidemic’ only started at the beginning of the C20th. Hence ‘they’ could only blame LC on the method of smoking or the absurd suggestion that poisons are added by the manufacturer, rather than tobacco per se. 



*

Update;
 The Lynne Eldridge article linked above has been removed/replaced on the internet (yet another indication of anti-smoker underhand tactics?) I have discovered that it was partly re-blogged by the Joan Gaeta Lung Cancer Fund and is still view-able /uncensored for the time being;

http://www.gaetafund.org/blogging-for-joan/why-anti-smoking-campaigns-arent-enough-to-eliminate-lung-cancer-deaths

A screen copy of Dr Eldridge's article is reproduced below;

Oh what a tangled web they weave!

Tuesday 28 August 2012

Fiddling while Rome burns



This is a comment I attempted to post in the Irish Independent where ASH appear to be taking naive local councillors for a ride. It wasn't approved by the moderator.

And Nero fiddled while Rome burned! 

“SMOKING has been banned in more than 100 playgrounds around the country as a growing number of local authorities tighten rules on lighting up in public places ... Although it is not yet an offence to light up in playgrounds, "no-smoking" signs are being erected as a deterrent to smokers in these areas ... The main pressure has come from the anti-smoking group ASH”

Our health service is in crisis, unable to properly treat the ill, the aged are neglected, scarce resources are having to be spread ever more wider, yet dubious anti-smoker ideology still gets priority, sucking from the public purse.  On the pretext of protecting children, the anti-smoker juggernaut moves to impose its next ban towards its prohibitionist agenda goal. Highly trained, highly paid doctors are diverted away from treating the sick into political lobbying that does nothing more than constrict the individual and erode liberties. The sad part is that it is all built on the misconception that second hand smoke is harmful. 

I’m sure these doctors who have been co-opted into the tobacco CONTROL industry do have honourable intentions but they have been caught up in an ‘error cascade’ or 'information cascade' that was set in motion many years ago. Medical science has been seriously compromised and degraded with much of it no longer used for the purpose of finding causes and cures but purely to further tobacco CONTROL objectives under the flawed assumption that “We know what the problem is, it was ‘proven’ over 50 years ago, all we have to do is to prevent people from smoking”.  Well, with the benefit of around 6 decades of hindsight, it has NOT worked. 

So called ‘smoke related’ diseases continue to increase despite the substantial reduction in smokers and there is some suggestion that life expectancy, that has been steadily rising over the last century, is stalling. New cases of Lung cancer in USA for instance, that totaled  around 50,000 in 1950, rose to over 164,000 in 2000 then to over 215,000 in 2008. (American Cancer Society stats - screen grab below) The trend is similar in England where newly diagnosed cancers rose by a staggering 100,000 from 143,000 in 1971 to 243,000 in 2006. (Statistics.gov).  These are raw figures that will have been tortured, age and population adjusted to make them appear less stark (US pop increased by 8% between 2000 and 2008) Here are some other age adjusted figures;

All cancers male (age adjusted);  
USA -   407 per 100,000
China - 205 per 100,000
(Pfizer facts: The Burden of Cancer in Asia - 2008)

compare with Male smoking rate;
USA; around 25% (or less) 
China; around 60% (fairly constant over last 30+ years)

(USA has half the smoker rate but twice the cancer rate of China!)

While the ‘experts’ and vacant public ‘servants’ are shaking their lances at those windmills and playing on their out-of-tune fiddles, health services are being starved of funding and finding it increasingly difficult to cope,  while public health continues to worsen