Smoking Ban Increases Heart Disease in Scotland

Obviously nothing to do with the battered lard pies they eat morning, noon and night. But ‘they’ cited the decrease in the year after the ban came in as a victory. Wonder what they’ll say now that their ‘good work’ has all been undone.

http://devilskitchen.me.uk/2008/11/what-you-didnt-read-this-week.html

Virtually every newspaper in Britain reported that Scotland had seen a large fall in heart attacks since March 2006 (when the ban started) and so – post hoc ergo propter hoc – it was the ban wot done it. The Guardian’s report – Smoking ban brings big cut in heart attacks in Scotland, study finds – was typical of the media’s willingness to believe in this delightful little fairy-tale.

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Inevitably, one the hatchet-faced gurners from Action on Smoking and Health piped up to make the implied connection with passive smoking explicit.

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When the study was finally published in July this year it got another flurry of international press attention. By this time, the belief that heart attacks had fallen by 17% had become established fact and was being cited in a bid for world domination.

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But the smell of bullshit lingered over the story and this week the truth finally emerged.

You see, we don’t need to pay partisan researchers to estimate how many people get admitted to hospital for heart attacks because the hospitals count and diagnose all the patients themselves. These figures are then compiled and published by professional statisticians. It takes them a while to do it, but that’s because they want to get it right. They don’t just want to pull numbers out of their arses to provide lazy journalists with fanciful stories.

And when these professional statisticians have collated the information properly, they publish it online for all to see, showing the recent trend and the long-term trend.

They finally got round to doing this on Wednesday and everything that was reported last year was exposed as a shabby load of old bollocks. Yes, admissions for acute coronary syndrome had fallen after the ban but they had been falling for years as this graph shows:

The figure was nowhere near 17%. It was 7.2%. And, above all, the rate went up for the first time in a decade the following year – by 7.8%. In other words, there were more heart attacks in smoke-free Scotland last year than there were before the ban.

Quality.

AJ