Ok...so I'm hijacking my own thread..... Big thanks Leaford on finding those links.
Dr. Phillips is now at U of Alberta as a professor of public health according to this CBC article.
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/01/06/f-rfa-durham.html He seems to be all about the harm reduction and might be a good person to contact regarding the ban here in Canada.
My daughter is an epidemiologist who while attending school was surprised to learn that although we here in Newfoundland have one of the highest rates of smoking in the country (sometimes we're highest, sometimes Quebec), we have the lowest rate of lung cancer in the country. I don't for a moment mean to suggest that cigarette smoking isn't responsible for lung cancer....BUT....what can be drawn from that statistic is there are other common causative agents. Newfoundland and Labrador is a geographically large province with a very small population. We have no heavy industry to speak of, because of the small population we don't have the concentration of auto exhaust found in larger cities. It's a windy place stuck out in the Atlantic known for it's clean air. I think here, the statistics for disease among smokers are probably closer to true because of a relative lack of other contributing factors. This is very supportive of harm reduction strategies as it shows that not having some of those environmental toxins reduced our harm (cancer rates) in spite of high numbers of smokers. Imagine how low the rates could be if we all switched to vaping?? I do realize that statistics are the most suspect form of information and that ummmmm roughly 57.6% of them are made up on the spot. (72% of clams today are less happy than they were 20 years ago
) but they do have some value.
Margaret
