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.
1 comment:
You may not of seen that I had written a reply in Medical News, I'll give you the benefit now, I called it "It's A Shame His Results Are Not Based On Science."
posted by Dave Atherton on 14 Oct 2009 at 6:16 am
While I accept much of the evidence on active smoking I most certainly beg to differ with Professor Konrad Jamrozik on second hand smoke (SHS). If I can quote Dr. Gio Gori on the fraud of SHS I am not an "imbecile that needs to be deceived for my own good." The fatal flaw in his 2005 paper below, is that Professor Jamrozik included active smokers in his figures and with 86% of lung cancer occurring in smokers, I think publication bias is the least I can say.
On his Estimate of deaths attributable to passive smoking among UK adults: database analysis BMJ 2005 (paid for by ASH) the Rapid Responses in the British Medical Journal were mostly critical and much of it was at a basic research level too.
E.g. Dr. Peter Lee Consultant a Consultant Statistician "Overall, the paper must be regarded as speculative and unscientific, adding nothing to the debate on passive smoking."
Or Dr. Gio Gori again "We are facing the ugly prospect that the entire epidemiologic literature on ETS is in fact a gross delusion. Should the flagrant inconsistency of the various results surprise?"
Alastair G Browne MSc BEng(Hons) "To summarise, this paper is biased and scientifically invalid. It draws upon material produced from other sources and rather than analysing them, accepts them as hard fact---even though it may not have been the case that the authors of the sources in question intended for their papers to be taken as fact. The act of taking potentially false information, then applying statistical analysis to it, results in a completely meaningless set of figures"
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/eletters/330/7495/812#99014
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/youropinions.php?opinionid=42655
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