The World Health Organization parodies itself and pronounces a “global tobacco epidemic“:
Tobacco use killed 100 million people worldwide in the 20th century and could kill one billion people in the 21st unless governments act now to dramatically reduce it, the World Health Organization said in a report Thursday. …
The WHO Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic, 2008 calls on all countries to dramatically increase efforts to prevent young people from beginning to smoke, help smokers quit, and protect nonsmokers from exposure to second hand smoke.
It urges governments to adopt six “tobacco control policies” – raise taxes and prices of tobacco; ban tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship; protect people from second hand smoke; warn people about the dangers of tobacco; help those who want to quit smoking; and monitor tobacco use to understand and reverse the epidemic.
“The tobacco epidemic already kills 5.4 million people a year from lung cancer, heart disease and other illnesses,” Chan said. “Unchecked, that number will increase to more than 8 million a year by 2030.”
My guess, based on other inflated tobacco-death studies I’ve seen, is that the numbers of this “epidemic” (remember when epidemics were serious illnesses that wiped out millions in a matter of days?) are greatly inflated by including “heart disease and other illnesses”; if you’re a smoker and have a heart attack, that will be attributed to smoking and nothing else.
And make no mistake, this study will be overhyped for one thing: “protecting” people from secondhand smoke, the only substance in the realms of science that is poisonous no matter how small the dose. Just ask the Surgeon General.
Background: Here are a select few other Crisis du Jour entries.
