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A tobacco control advocate questions the Surgeon General’s

assertions on the dangers of ETS.

Michael Siegel, a physician and tobacco control advocate who supports smoking bans, criticizes former Surgeon General Carmona's public statements for "falsely claiming or implying that brief, transient exposure to secondhand smoke raises the risk of lung cancer, cardiovascular disease and heart attack." Siegel pointed out on his blog, "It takes years of exposure to tobacco smoke even for a smoker to develop heart disease," and "It is also quite misleading to tell the public that a brief exposure to secondhand smoke increases the risk of lung cancer.

If you read through or search the entire 727-page report, you will not find any conclusion that a brief exposure to secondhand smoke increases heart attack risk. And for good reason: there is no such evidence. The report itself is very carefully reviewed science and it is cautious in drawing causal conclusions. Not so the summary of the conclusions of the report provided by the Surgeon General.

It is as if the Surgeon General didn't even read his own report. It is as if he simply decided in advance the claims he wanted to make, and made them, regardless of whether there was evidence in the report to support them, or whether the report had drawn those conclusions.

"There is certainly no evidence for this and the Surgeon General's report itself draws no such conclusion," Siegel wrote. "In fact, the report makes it clear that most of the studies linking secondhand smoke and lung cancer studied non-smokers with many years of intense exposure."

Whether this is simply a serious mistake or an intentional attempt to deceive is not clear to me. But the effect is that anti-smoking groups across the country have ended up misrepresenting the science to the public, themselves deceived into thinking that these particular conclusions are rock solid.