An international award has been given to the University of Adelaide's Professor Konrad Jamrozik, who has spent the past 30 years campaigning against smoking and helping smokers to kick the habit.
He's quite a guy, this Jamrozik.
Since the mid 1980s, Professor Jamrozik has combined his academic and clinical work with his passion for tobacco control as a "part-time activist but full-time advocate".
One would assume from this that if he were to conduct a 'scientific' study, it would only come to one conclusion. You would attach about as much significance to it as you would a study by British American Tobacco claiming that smoking turns you into Usain Bolt.
Wouldn't you?
Not so the BBC.
Passive smoking kills more than 11,000 a year in the UK - much higher than previously thought, a study shows.
Report author Konrad Jamrozik said: "It is clear that adoption of smoke free policies in all workplaces in the UK might prevent several hundred premature deaths each year."
Also, not so if you are nice-but-dim British MP.
His work on deaths attributable to passive smoking was cited at least nine times in the Westminster Parliamentary debate that led to the adoption of smoke-free legislation.
And was the study flawed, innumerate, and ... well, there's no nice way of putting it ... shit?
Of course it was. What else could one expect?
In other news, an Israeli has produced a study that 'proves' Palestinians are descended from the Devil, and Pepsi have conclusive evidence that Coca Cola is the prime cause of dementia.
Yeah, I reckon the Beeb will swallow that too, and MPs will scuttle around passing retarded legislation on the back of it.
What a ridiculous country we live in.
