HPHWD

Some retrospective case-control studies by Richard Doll and Bradford Hill in the UK had linked lung cancer to cigarette smoking. But Cornfield wanted a stronger conclusion. He wanted to know whether the correlation was actually a cause-and-effect relationship. He also wanted to use statistics to assess the risk that an individual who smokes would develop lung cancer. By using Bayes’ rule, Cornfield was able to combine Doll and Hill’s results (namely, the estimated probability that someone was a smoker, given that they had lung cancer) with NIH data to answer the inverse question: the probability that someone would develop lung cancer, given that he was a smoker. The result: smokers are many times more likely to develop lung cancer than nonsmokers.

Cette représentation d’une scène de vie au travail illustre l’un des tournants de l’histoire de la cigarette : sa capacité, par sa consomption rapide, à se lover dans les interstices de l’organisation scientifique du travail industriel qui se met en place dans les premières décennies du XXe siècle, jusqu’à détrôner pipes et cigares dans les années 1920. Jamais sans doute succès commercial d’un produit de grande diffusion n’aura ainsi touché d’aussi près la racine étymologique du mot « consommation », à savoir la destruction — et même la double destruction puisqu’elle affecte aussi bien l’émetteur de la fumée que son réceptacle, à savoir le système respiratoire.

In the mid-1990s, the two main British-based tobacco companies whose market was predominantly in the UK were Gallaher, now part of Japan Tobacco International and Imperial Tobacco. But their domestic market was declining and they needed to find new markets. So they sold abroad. Although this is perfectly legal, by the late 1990s Imperial Tobacco and Gallaher were exporting billions of cigarettes to countries where almost no one smoked them. These cigarettes were then entering the black market and were being smuggled back into the UK.

Over the long term, however, federal spending would be higher (on net) for federal retirement and health care programs as increases in the number of beneficiaries because of greater longevity outweighed the decline in average annual health care spending per capita.