According to a new report by the US Surgeon General, smoking just one cigarette can trigger a heart attack.  Dr. Regina Benjamin also claims that even brief exposure to second hand smoke can have the same effect.  She backs up this claim with a list of hundreds of people who have had myocardial infarctions after one smoke or one whiff of SHS.

I know, I know, I’m being silly.  She doesn’t have hundreds of examples.  Or dozens.  Or one.  She’s simply continuing the long and time-honored Surgeon General’s  tradition of Making Up Shit.

For decades we’ve been told tobacco smoke contains over 4,000 chemicals.  Now  that number has magically jumped to 7,000.  Not for any reason, it just has, because she said so.  Doesn’t that sound scary?  Of course,  there are nearly 3,000 chemicals in a cup of coffee and over 10,000 chemicals in most meals.*

And once again we’re warned there is no safe level of exposure to tobacco smoke.  There are safe levels of exposure to arsenic, cyanide, strychnine, hell, everything except tobacco smoke.

Imagine the reaction if she claimed there was no safe level of exposure to campfire smoke.  She’d be laughed out of the office.

I know, I’m being silly again.  In reality it would result in  comprehensive bans on campfires.  For the childreeeeen, of course.

This has received surprisingly little press.   I’d like to think that’s because the media realized how stupid they looked in 2009 when they parroted the third hand smoke nonsense, but I doubt it.  It’s simply a matter of timing – there are just a lot of other things happening in the world right now.  Dr. B. needs to learn to spew her nonsense on slow news days.

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*Do those numbers sound credible?  I hope so, because I just made them up.  Why should the nannies have all the fun?