BMJ  2003;327:505 (30 August), doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7413.505

Letter

Passive smoking

Summary of rapid responses

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Editor—More than 140 readers responded to Enstrom and Kabat's paper and Davey Smith's editorial.^{1 2} Some of the passion and most of the science is captured in the letters above. What follows is a necessarily brief overview of the remaining ones. The debate started with some orthodox critical comment on the paper: the analysis underestimated the risk to passive smokers, was underpowered, distorted, poorly reported, placed out of context, or just plain wrong. The two main contentions were that a smoking spouse is a poor proxy for passive smoking (because everyone smoked in the 1950s, so people with non-smoking spouses were still exposed at work), and that many quitters are misclassified as smokers. Both would reduce the difference in mortality between exposed and non-exposed groups. In general, the criticisms were poorly substantiated; only four letters (3%) referred to actual data in the paper.

The discussions then widened to a number of . . . [Full text of this article]

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