Death, when it comes to someone you love and respect, one of your kith and kin, is hard to take, it rips you apart. Outside of your nearest and dearest a death is less tearworthy [thinking friends here] but the loss is heart rending never the less. But when it comes to a death of someone you do not respect, because they hit the headlines with outrageous claims, in Konrad's case, Second Hand Smoke kills, you shed no tears at all. In fact some of us may crow at his demise.
I will not crow to the fact that you despised me as a smoker or that you were one of the original perp's of junk science to put me down as a mass murderer because I smoke, not that I was killing myself but that I was killing those about me, something that I will not swallow, but I'll listen. Everyone has something to say, and they should be given a hearing, rightly or wrongly, you then have to make up your own mind if they are talking bollocks. Konrad, you talked ballocks.
As JJ says in the comments section over at DP's place:
Sorry DP – but I won’t be shedding any big tears for this man. His work was once quoted to me by my shitty county council as being a benchmark by which they further extended their policy of non-smoking in public areas surrounding Kelham Hall.Then you read his [Konrad's] bio:
Since the mid-1980s, Konrad combined his academic and clinical work with his passion for tobacco control, as a part-time activist but full-time advocate. His approach to advocacy was both opportunistic and unrelenting - "like water dripping on a stone... you never know which drip will crack it".It is hard to take this man seriously. Very hard. In life and in death.
As an academic expert he generated significant new evidence on the impact of smoking on vascular disease, particularly on stroke, and analysed the evidence as a member of numerous expert groups including the National Health and Medical Research Council's Second Working Party on Passive Smoking, an enquiry that the tobacco industry found so threatening they sought to gag its members through legal action.
R.I.P Konrad. I will not crow at your demise even though you are three years younger than me; a smoker and a drinker. Misinformation is a killer, what killed you? Self righteous indignation I suspect.
HatTip to Dick Puddlecote, who is more learned than I.
