PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 24, 2006
Helena Debunked Again
New evidence has been found contradicting the claim a smoking ban in Helena Montana caused a 40% drop in heart attacks, adding to the substantial body of such criticism already online in the British Medical Journal's Rapid Response section.
In an interview with David W. Kuneman, Director of Research for the Smokers' Club, Inc. he stated that, "I had heard all the claims of the Helena authors, that heart attacks dropped 40% during the June through December 2002 Helena smoking ban and returned to normal after the ban was lifted. In September 2005, the whole state went smoke-free and I wanted to see if Helena was again reporting another abrupt drop in heart attacks."
What he found instead was even more surprising, according to Kuneman, "I found no data showing a second heart attack drop in 2005, instead I found Montana Senate Committee on Business and Labor minutes from April 2003 recording testimony that many businesses, including three of the five major casinos, ignored the 2002 Helena ban and many other customers simply migrated to East Helena, which had no ban. The surprising thing about these minutes is that they indicated that two of the Helena authors attended this meeting."
"If those two authors heard this testimony, that the 2002 ban may have had little effect on public smoke exposure, then they had an ethical duty to report that when they published their Helena study in 2004." Kuneman added.
The researcher considered the possibility that the testimony was wrong and researched local newspaper archives to learn more. What he found was even more surprising. Kuneman found that "The local health department announced they would not enforce the ban for the first three months of it's six-month lifespan. I also found out during the second three months violations were so common they had to assign a police officer 20 hours/week to enforce it." He also discovered that roughly three quarters of Helena's restaurants had banned smoking on their own even before a ban was in place, indicating that the need of an officer working officially as a ban enforcer indicated continued widespread noncompliance.
Among the many responses critical of the original Helena study was one published in the online BMJ in January of 2006. Doctors Brad Rodu, of the University of Kentucky, and Philip Cole, of the University of Alabama, reviewed the history of Helena's heart attacks between 1990 and 2003 and found a number of variations in heart attacks in the 40% range. They concluded one of those random variations simply coincided with the June 2002 Helena ban purely by chance.
Kuneman's findings on compliance were added to the BMJ commentary in March but as of this date the Helena authors have not responded with any contradictory evidence that the ban was widely complied with and resulted in a significant decline in secondhand smoke exposure.
"Without that, they can't argue the ban caused the 40% drop in heart attacks," said Kuneman. . "They never responded to the comments of Drs. Rodu and Cole either so. I can only assume at this time, that the authors do not have the science on their side to defend their research."
Given the scope and impact of the original media releases and follow ups surrounding the Helena research and the impact of those releases on implementation of smoking bans across the country, the criticisms and unanswered questions posed by Kuneman, Rodu, and others deserve widespread attention by a concerned press.
Contact:
Samantha Phillipe
President
The Smoker's Club, Inc.
PO Box 814
Center Conway, NH 03813
Fax: 207-925-6566
Email: info@smokersclub.com###
Reference: http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/328/7446/977 and Rapid Responses.