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Originally Posted by ian@huth
The problem with statistics is that they only show what the publisher wants them to show.
There is a difference between 114,000 people in the UK are killed by smoking each year and 114,000 smokers die in the UK each year. They may die of illnesses that could have been a result of them smoking or the same illness could have been caused by many other factors. They are automatically put in the "death caused by smoking" group simply because they are smokers. They could just as well have died from the same illness if they had never smoked a cigarette in their life or been anywhere where they encounted passive smoke.
Deaths from passive smoking are even harder to be correctly diagnosed. They die prematurely from an illness that could have been smoking related but could just as easily be nothing to do with smoking. A non-smoking barman dies from lung cancer so it must be because of the effects of passive smoking. Why must it?
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It's a good point. But smoking has been being investigated for such a long time now, I think we have to give the experts a bit of credit. What benefit would be gained from making smoking out to be more dangerous to be than it actually is, especially when as has been mentioned, so much tax is spent on cigarettes in the UK. Perhaps the statistics that best illustrate the risks of smoking would be the numbers of smokers who develop certain illnesses compared to the non-smokers.