At the office, smokers' areas have been built so they can smoke away from building entrances. In an effort to spruce it, little laurel trees were planted all around the smoker's area. What has interested me is how the laurel trees haven't grown very well -- their leaves are straggly and many are brown. These trees stand in contrast to all the other trees at the office -- it makes you wonder if something isn't stunting their growth.
I don't know -- I was just pondering. My friends in the tobacco industry say all the studies that say cigarettes give smokers cancer are flawed. What do you think?
Smoking costs Health Service more than previously estimated
Smoking costs the NHS over £5 billion a year, more than three times previous estimates, according to new research.
Care for people who smoke accounts for over five per cent of the overall budget, they found.
The cost has gone up by around five times in the last 18 years, boffins said, though the proportion of the entire budget has not changed dramatically in that time.
1 comments:
That's what they usually say - that the studies are flawed. Given any study, one can often find some supposed flaw in it - a misquoted reference, for example, or an analysis of results that isn't quite state-of-the-art.
For example, a tobacco industry insider once told me that a classic study of smoking among doctors (one which found a strong positive correlation) was flawed because it didn't include doctors who smoked only a little.
This doesn't mean a study is wrong, but it gives the smoking advocates a pretext to discount it.
What none of them has ever managed to explain to me is why there seems to be a long-running conspiracy among medical researchers to falsely claim that smoking is bad for you and why the tobacco industry hasn't sued them for lost profits.
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