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** 14 September 2020
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** UK
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** Peers call on Jenrick to explain opposition to smokefree zones (#1)
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** Revealed: ex-MPs use parliament access passes over 2,500 times in a year (#2)
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** Statistics, lies and the virus: Tim Harford’s five lessons from a pandemic (#3)
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** International
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** US Study: Mice studies find vaping may raise the risk of breast cancer, warn scientists (#4)
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** UK
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** The Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government Robert Jenrick, is under cross-party pressure to explain why he opposed smoking bans for pavement areas outside pubs and restaurants, echoing arguments made by tobacco companies. The government introduced a law allowing hospitality venues to expand onto pavements, to help them boost capacity amid social-distancing restrictions. Councils were given discretion as to whether these would be smokefree zones.

Jenrick wrote to Manchester City Council warning that “if smoking were banned outside pubs and cafes, as you suggest it will be in Manchester, it could lead to significant closures across the country.”

Lord Young, along with Baroness Northover, Baroness Finlay of Llandaff and Lord Faulkner of Worcester, have written to Jenrick asking him to “share any evidence he has to substantiate the assertion that there would be adverse economic consequences if 100% smoke-free conditions were imposed”. The peers said: “The evidence from the UK and other jurisdictions ... does not show this to be the case. It is difficult to see why, given the option to extend premises to include the pavement, any licensee would prefer to close. Nevertheless, the tobacco industry, which clearly has an interest here, does make this argument.”

A spokesman for the Tobacco Manufacturers’ Association said that it welcomed Jenrick’s intervention but denied lobbying him on the issue.

Lord Young was told by the communities’ minister, Lord Greenhalgh, that guidance to councils over pavement licensing was issued jointly with the Department of Health and Social Care. Deborah Arnott, chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) said: “Lord Young and his cross-party colleagues wrote to the communities secretary pointing out that his letter to Manchester amounts to guidance and Parliament was told guidance would be joint with the Department of Health. They asked two simple questions: did the minister clear the letter with health colleagues before sending it, and what evidence did he have for his claims?”

Source: The Guardian, 13 September 2020
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** A “strategic counsel” for the lobbying firm Crosby Textor is among 324 former MPs who together used grace and favour passes to access the Houses of Parliament more than 2,500 times in a single year.

Data released after significant freedom of information victory by the Guardian reveals how frequently individual former MPs have been using their “category X” parliamentary pass. The pass grants the bearer continued access to the corridors of power after they step down, along with parliament’s subsidised restaurants and bars. MPs who serve a single parliamentary term are automatically eligible to apply for a pass, but critics argue the system is open to abuse.

Rachel Davies Teka, the head of advocacy at the anti-corruption campaign Transparency International UK, said grace and favour passes threatened the integrity of parliament and should be banned. She said: “Close access to lawmakers is highly valued by those seeking to influence public policy. Using a parliamentary security pass in the course of paid lobbying activity is an abuse of that privilege. We cannot see any justification for this entitlement that warrants accepting this risk.”

A Commons spokesperson said: “It has been practiced for some time to provide Palace of Westminster security identity passes to former members of parliament,” adding that it was forbidden for former MPs to use their passes for lobbying.

Source: The Guardian, 13 September 2020
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** Will this year be 1954 all over again? Nineteen fifty-four saw the appearance of two contrasting visions for the world of statistics — visions that have shaped our politics, our media, and our health. This year confronts us with a similar choice. The first of these visions were presented in How to Lie with Statistics, a book by a US journalist named Darrell Huff. For Huff and his followers, the reason to learn statistics is to catch the liars at their tricks. Once the cynicism sets in, it becomes hard to imagine that statistics could ever serve a useful purpose.

The alternative perspective was embodied in the publication of an academic paper by the British epidemiologists Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill. They marshalled some of the first compelling evidence that smoking cigarettes dramatically increases the risk of lung cancer. The data they assembled persuaded both men to quit smoking and helped save tens of millions of lives by prompting others to do likewise. This was no statistical trickery, but a contribution to public health that is almost impossible to exaggerate.

Doll and Hill’s painstaking approach illuminates the world and saves lives into the bargain. Huff’s alternative seems clever but is the easy path: seductive, addictive and corrosive. Scepticism has its place, but easily curdles into cynicism and can be weaponised into something even more poisonous than that. The two worldviews soon began to collide. Huff’s How to Lie with Statistics seemed to be the perfect illustration of why ordinary, honest folk should not pay too much attention to the slippery experts and their dubious data. Such ideas were quickly picked up by the tobacco industry, with its darkly brilliant strategy of manufacturing doubt in the face of evidence such as that provided by Doll and Hill.

As described in books such as Merchants of Doubt by Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes, this industry perfected the tactics of spreading uncertainty: calling for more research, emphasising doubt and the need to avoid drastic steps, and highlighting disagreements between experts and funding alternative lines of inquiry.

The same tactics, and sometimes even the same personnel, were later deployed to cast doubt on climate science. So, will 2020 be another 1954? From the point of view of statistics, we seem to be standing at another fork in the road. The disinformation is still out there, as the public understanding of COVID-19 has been muddied by conspiracy theorists, trolls, and government spin doctors. Yet the information is out there too. The value of gathering and rigorously analysing data has rarely been more evident. Faced with a complete mystery at the start of the year, statisticians, scientists, and epidemiologists have been working miracles.

“I hope that we choose the right fork because the pandemic has lessons to teach us about statistics — and vice versa — if we are willing to learn,” says Tim Harford.

Source: Financial Times, 10 September 2020
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** International
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**
A new study has suggested that vaping ‘could increase the risk of breast cancer.’ Scientists from a group of American universities, including Yale, Johns Hopkins and Princeton have found exposure to e-cigarette vapour creates a “tumour-promoting environment” in the breast and elsewhere in the body of mice.

The study used female mice to conduct the findings, with some of the rodents kept in fresh air while others were exposed to e-cigarette vapour. After a fortnight, all were injected with breast cancer. At the end of six weeks, tumours had grown almost twice as fast in the mice exposed to the vapour. The mice who inhaled e-cigarette vapour were also more likely to develop pulmonary metastasis – secondary malignant tumours in the lung, which is often fatal when it occurs in humans.

Writing in the journal Cancer Letters, the team stated that “young women represent a target of e-cigarette companies”, and the results came in the context of “the increasing popularity of vaping, especially in teenagers.”

Professor Charles Coombes, of the Cancer Research UK Imperial Centre, said: “The results are suggestive but not conclusive.”

Source: The Sun, 13 September 2020

See also: Daily Mail - Vaping DOES raise the risk of breast cancer, warn scientists amid concerns that young women are 'targeted by E-cigarette companies' ([link removed])
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ASH Daily News is a digest of published news on smoking-related topics. ASH is not responsible for the content of external websites. ASH does not necessarily endorse the material contained in this bulletin.

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