Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Around the 1990s, some women who had developed breast cancer began wondering if there were some particular factor causing it. There were regional differences in the incidence of breast cancer. Certain areas were high risk: the Northeast, the San Francisco Bay area (even Sherman ’s Briggs Hill was added—briefly). Risk factors were upper–income women, older than 50, Jewish, never had children or had first child at a later age, an early age at menarche, menopause at a late age, used hormone-replacement therapy, with (poor) diets rich in fats, and a family history of breast cancer.. Those were known high-risk factors. However, they could not be used to predict which women would get breast cancer nor could they be used for prevention. To those high-risk factors, alarmists added environmental pollution, with air-pollution still another factor (but small if at all). Epidemiologist Geoffrey C. Kabat ’s new book, Hyping Health Risks, Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of...

What is objectionable is that these voluminous and authoritative-appearing documents convey the message that passive smoking is a major cause of fatal disease, which few scientists believe to be the case. -– Geoffrey C. Kabat It’s a thrill when the author of a new book also served as an expert on a policy-making report with which one is familiar. The subject is ETS, environmental tobacco smoke (i.e., secondhand smoke or passive smoking). The EPA with the help of its Advisory Board in 1992 published its Report which found a very low relative risk of 1.19. It listed ETS as a Class A human carcinogen, which scientists believe it is not. That is the conclusion EPA intended to reach from the beginning, declared Federal District Court Judge Osteen, who discussed at length the Report’s plethora of errors. The unique, excellent new book is Hyping Health Risks, Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology (Columbia University Press, 2008). The author, epidemiolog...