This propaganda was given a reality check by the German Berufsgenossenschaft Nahrungsmittel und Gaststätten (BGN), the Employer's Liability Insurance Association for the Food and Hospitality Sector, a compulsory body for all companies in that area, controlled by trade unions and employers’ organizations alike.
Last year, their scientific and prevention department took a closer look at the fin
dings of tobacco control researcher Giovanni Invernizzi (and colleagues) saying that ETS causes more particulate matter than an ecodiesel engine running idle. This study has already been exposed by FORCES International in a thorough theoretical analysis a few years ago. The German scientists of the BGN did something else: they reproduced the experiment under equal circumstances. But they used various different measurement instruments. Their conclusion: With suitable instruments, the pollution by an idling diesel engine is much greater than the one by cigarettes. There is only one instrument that leads to another result: the one Invernizzi used, an Aerosol Monitor unable to detect a large part of the ultrafine particulate matter from the car.The BGN analysis is now available in English (3 pages).
Furthermore, the occupational health researchers from Mannheim scrutinized alleged risk elevation for lung cancer among exposed hospitality employees. Once again, they did own empirical work, using data by health insurance providers about millions of employees in Germany, comparing the hospitality worker to peoples working in other branches of trade . Their conclusion:
“In contrast to the estimated data in the “calculated” models, this analysis of real patients’ data
showed results that prove a lot less lung cancers, and heart and bronchial diseases of
employees in this sector, compared to other sectors. There was no distinction between
smokers and non-smokers.“
If reality does not support epidemiologist charlatanry, then reality must be wrong.
In more general terms, the scientists critized the literature on passive smoking and lung cancer.
“The results of international studies vary considerably, to an extent almost
unprecedented in other fields of epidemiology.
The consequences of the usage of incomparable methods in the individual studies are not scientifically nor socially defensible.
The quality of meta-studies and overview studies is questionable because they cannot
be better than the bases upon which they rely.
It is astonishing how uncritically authors of meta-studies and overview studies deal with
recent studies from the literature and how airily they draw far-reaching conclusions.”
This analysis (7 pages) is also available in English.
The BGN also questions the invented figure of 3.301 annual deaths by passive smoking in Germany, the antis’ propaganda myth no. 1. In a scientific conference, Prof. Ulrich Keil, Big Pharma friend, tobacco control alchemist, and the inventor of these non-existing deaths, was faced with critical questions by the head of the BGN Prevention department, Prof. Dr. Romano Grieshaber. Keil reacted typically: He immediately fled from the conference room.
Speaking the truth makes you unpopular with anti-tobacco, so Prof. Grieshaber became the target of the usual witch-hunt. Behind the scenes, people like Keil tried to remove him from his office at the BGN, the WHO Collaborating Centre on Tobacco Controll in Germany attacked him, using the “well-known defense mechanisms like defamation, emotionalization, and the allegation of dependences” (official BGN paper).
We hope that the voices of scientific decency will not be silenced.
