You misrepresent what I said. I said "One billion people have tested diacetyl inhalation for their entire adult lifetime and have a 100.0000000000% null result.". That is a simple statement of FACT by virtue that NOT ONE CASE OF BO IS KNOWN BY US TO HAVE BEEN REPORTED IN SMOKERS, except the rare cases reported with known associations to BO (all very dusty industrial environments). That has nothing to with "my certainty". If you want to dispute my 100% number, please link to cases of BO found within the smoking population with no known industrial link. If you cannot provide those links then you must agree with my 100% number because it remains a statement of fact.
Let's run the numbers... in the USA alone there are about 40 million smokers (1). The overall death rate in the general population is around 0.8% (3). The death rate among smokers should be higher or the idea that smoking takes years off your life is a total lie. So we will be conservative. On a quick google I see an overall autopsy rate of 8.5% (2) but I'll use your 5% so you don't waste time chiseling numbers.
So we have 40,000,0000 * 0.008 * 0.05 lungs that are autopsied. That is 16,000 smoker's lungs PER YEAR. The link between diacetyl and popcorn workers has been known for over 10 years now. In the past ten years 160,000 smoker's lungs have been autopsied.
Now, at this point you have to decide what the incident rate might be, and that is difficult because the known incident rate is 0%. Note that I avoided decimal places in order to minimize the opportunity for you to pick nits with my writing style, having failed to argue this based on any facts.
If it is 1% then that leaves 1600 (ETA: BO infested) autopsied lungs. The incident rate among popcorn workers, and particularly popcorn mixers was far higher than 1% but I'm not going to spend time looking up those numbers. Maybe someone else can chime in. But for the sake of argument, let's use 1%.
Now, if the general USA population during the last 10 years has averaged 300 million, and the average death rate is 0.8% and the autopsy rate is 5% (note my source of 8+%) then that leaves us with about 120,000 autopsies a year. I figure the average pathologist might do 2 two autopsies a day, including preparing the written report. That's about 500 per year. That leaves us at least 240 people doing autopsies in the USA alone. It's probably higher but I'm being conservative here.
This suggests that those 160,000 autopsies were spread out thinly among a huge pool of pathologists. At least hundreds. Yet not a single one of those pathologists was aware of the increasing interest in diacetyl and the possible link to smoking. Or none of them was able to somehow discern the difference between BO and smoking related COPD despite the fact that it was easily done in a pool of a couple hundred popcorn workers. None of those BO infested lungs got autopsied by a medical institution seeking to train pathologists or doing basic mortality research.
The USA has about 4.2% of the world's population. And about 4% of the world's smokers. So you could easily multiply my USA estimates by 25 and get 16,000 * 25 = 400,000 smoker's lungs being autopsied each year, and 4 MILLION autopsied lungs in the past decade. You would have to make additional estimates of worldwide autopsy rates. But no matter how low the multiplier, it only increases the pool of lungs. And if you want to severely downplay the worldwide numbers you have to get into some very USA-centric thinking that we are the only people on earth capable and interested in autopsies.
How many times do you need to flip a coin, and come up heads every time, to equal those odds?
You are making increasingly unbelievable claims, plus simply resorting to attacking my writing style, because no matter how you slice the numbers or adjust them, the evidence that diacetyl is unrelated to smoking disease is simply overwhelming. I can't even believe we are having this discussion. It is surreal.
How long do we have to go back and forth with you attacking my writing style and making ever more absurdly speculative claims before we can come to the conclusion that if smokers were getting BO we would know it? How long do we have to go back and forth before you accept the conclusion of the medical community that BO is unrelated to smoking?
And finally, I am very curious of your motives. Why do you persist in increasingly silly speculations and criticisms in the face of overwhelming facts? I have my opinion but I will keep my counsel on that.
1)
CDC - Fact Sheet - Adult Cigarette Smoking in the United States - Smoking & Tobacco Use
2)
Medscape: Medscape Access
3)
FastStats
