In 1993 the Environmental Protection Agency declared that "passive smoke," or "environmental tobacco smoke" has cancer-causing properties. This evidence "is sufficient by itself to establish ETS as a known human lung carcinogen ... and estimated that it causes 3,000 deaths from lung cancer every year."
There was and still is an important qualification missing from the original scientific draft that stated "these estimates, however, are based on a number of assumptions that may not hold."
- Because lung cancer is a disease that develops slowly and manifests itself for the most part at an advanced age, the exposure to ETS needs to be measured over the lifetime of nonsmokers.
- Sixty- to 70-year-old nonsmokers had been asked to recall what their personal exposure to ETS might have been during their lifetimes. Their reveries - elicited in a few minutes usually over the phone, were recorded by the studies as precise numbers devoid of error and uncertainty.
- Statistical evidence does not appear to support a conclusion that there are substantial health effects of passive smoking. It is possible that very few or even no deaths can be attributed to ETS.
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