{Go directly to The Facts}

A year or so ago, in a Usenet debate, some nanny was yammering about the dangers of second hand smoke, citing the EPA's report. I replied with a longish article that was nothing more than a list of facts. Fact: The EPA announced their results before completing the study. Fact: They ignored 2/3s of the available data. Fact: etc. etc. etc. There were about ten facts in the list. The nanny came back into the newsgroup, answered some other articles, ignored mine, and vanished forever.

A couple of months later, in an different newsgroup, a different nanny was doing the same old tired litany, and I dug my list of facts out of Dejanews and posted it again. Once again the nanny was speechless, and vanished from the group rather quickly.

I played around with the idea of doing an article on the subject, but then realized there was enough information to do an entire web site. Simply listing the facts about the EPA study and the WHO study was enough to silence, or at least slow down, some of the nannies proclaiming the dangers of SHS.

Understanding the flaws of the EPA study, and the reason the WHO study was important, required some knowledge of epidemiology. I went in search of information about it, but found very little. Most of what is out there is too confusing for the layman to understand.

And so The Facts was born. It contains a couple of pages of epidemiology for beginners, which should come in handy for anyone who wants to debunk (or confirm) any health studies. It has a long list of facts about the EPA study, facts that make it rather difficult to argue that the study was anything other than an intentional fraud. And it contains a page of details about the WHO study, and what it did and didn't show. It's topped off with a heaping helping of links to original articles and studies so people can do their own research.

I had a lot of help with this, from some very fine folks. Some just pointed out an error or two, some spent considerable time with me making sure I understood all the concepts and got all the facts right. And when they were finished, my invisible editor and proofreader went over it with even more care than usual to make sure it was readable and understandable. I wish I wore a hat so I could tip it to all of you who helped; without your contributions this site would be ugly and full of embarrassing mistakes.

You can find The Facts at http://www.davehitt.com/facts. Although I retain the copyright to it, it is designed to be copied, cribbed, cut & pasted, plagiarized and used however you see fit in the fight against nannies, politicians & junk science.

August, 2000

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© 2000 Dave Hitt