California Construction Trucking Association (CCTA)

Not to Be Outdone by the UC School System, CARB, and EPA – The European Public Health Science Community Has to Add Some of its Own Deception, Too!

Okay, I am going to admit it here for all to read: I may be in over my head, but I will take my best shot at trying to explain the most recent study about how particulate matter from vehicles is a “major” cause of hearth attacks.

I recently read about a public health study published on February 24th in the British medical journal The Lancet. The study’s official name was “Public Health Importance of Triggers of Myocardial Infarction: A Comparative Risk Assessment.” The study results were picked up by a few mostly liberal media outlets, including the Huffington Post and, of course, public health news outlets like Healthday News, which titled their story, “Coffee, Sex, Smog Can All Trigger Heart Attack.”

After choking on the coffee I had not yet swallowed, wondering if a heart attack was imminent, it was time to summon all my brain cells and try to make sense of what I was reading because something sounded very wrong about this study and its results. You almost can’t go a week without some study (publically funded) that supports the crazy environmentalist movement and attacks on vehicles.

Curious, when I first started reading the article here about this study, I thought this was a broad study about behaviors that could cause heart attacks. Then I noticed that the study left out obesity, smoking, even secondhand smoke, and I began to suspect something was not kosher. As I guessed, the study was another typical hit piece on vehicle emissions, pure and simple. Another big public relations scam, where the reader is led to believe the results were a “surprise” because so many things were looked at. This is what people call bait-and-switch marketing, and the enviro’s and their paid academics have this down to a science – political science.

Fortunately, around the same day that these press releases came out on this study, the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) had a small editorial about it. ACSH’s communications director Jody Manley noted about the study: “Regardless of what the reasons for the media enthusiasm might be, the researchers have almost nothing to back up their claims.” ACSH’s Dr. Gilbert Ross concurred, asking, “How did this nonsense get published? It seems that recently The Lancet will publish almost anything that suits its agenda, whatever the evidence base is – or is not.”

Sometimes these health studies are a little hard for me to get all the way around, but when it comes in the form of this type of propaganda, I frankly get irritated. There seems to be a never-ending series of claims about vehicle emissions that come out of the public health community these days.

For those of you who, like me, prefer to cut through the crap, this is what should be exposed concerning this junk science study from Europe – Belgium, specifically.

It turns out this study looked at many of the causes or triggers of heart attacks, including the biggest contributor, cocaine use. However, the rationale behind adding air pollution from vehicle emissions is that more people are stuck in traffic (thanks to environmentalists) and exposed to these emissions (particulate matter PM2.5 & 10 in this case). But when the low-risk activity of sitting in traffic for long periods each day is weighted, there is a compounding exposure element that now makes this insignificant activity highly relevant – and according to the study – the leading cause of heart attacks. More simply stated, because only a small number of people in the entire population are exposed to cocaine, and hundreds of millions are exposed to vehicle emissions daily, PM exposure was estimated to cause more heart attacks across the population than cocaine.
The ACSH noted that, “The Lancet was releasing a ‘study’ purporting to show that exposure to traffic was the leading proximate cause of heart attacks.” The editorial went on to say, “The [study] researchers also claimed that air pollution triggered more heart attacks than getting angry, having sex, snorting cocaine, smoking marijuana, or suffering a respiratory infection. The study authors based their conclusions on a ‘meta-regression analysis’ of 36 specially selected ‘individual and population’ studies, which they found on science websites and databases.”

Of course I had to look up what meta-regression analysis was. It involves the field of statistics; a meta-analysis combines the results of several studies that address a set of related research hypotheses. In its simplest form, this is normally by identification of a common measure of effect size, for which a weighted average might be the output of a meta-analyses. Here the weighting might be related to sample sizes within the individual studies. More generally, there are other differences between the studies that need to be allowed for, but the general aim of a meta-analysis is to more powerfully estimate the true “effect size” as opposed to a smaller “effect size” derived in a single study under a given single set of assumptions and conditions. Makes sense to me.

So, let me give you all the ranking triggers for activities (in this study) that may result in a heart attack (prior to being weighted for exposure). The risks defined in this report are from the highest to the lowest. And they are:

1. Use of cocaine
2. A heavy meal,
3. Smoking of marijuana,
4. Negative emotions,
5. Physical,
6. Exertion,
7. Positive,
8. Emotions,
9. Anger,
10. Sexual activity,
11. Traffic exposure,
12. Respiratory infections,
13. Coffee consumption.

Yes, vehicle emissions (PM10 and smaller) exposure was rated number 11 overall as the most dangerous trigger, but because of how the exposure prevalence data was calculated, or weighted, it miraculously became the leading cause of heart attacks. There’s a 16% higher risk of a heart attack from driving in traffic than from exercising, the next leading cause. In the study’s findings, it said, “Of the epidemiologic studies reviewed, 36 provided ‘sufficient details’ to be considered. In the studied populations, the exposure prevalence (those who experienced a particular activity) for triggers in the relevant control time window ranged from .04% for cocaine use to 100% for air pollution.”

This section of the study also stated, “The reported odds ratios (OR) ranged from 1.05 to 23.7. Ranking triggers from the highest to the lowest OR resulted in the following order: use of cocaine, heavy meal, smoking of marijuana, negative emotions, physical exertion, positive emotions, anger, sexual activity, traffic exposure, respiratory infections, coffee consumption, air pollution (based on a difference of 30 μg/m3 in particulate matter with a diameter <10 μm [PM10]). Taking into account the OR and the prevalence of exposure, the highest PAF was estimated for traffic exposure (7.4%).”

So while this story headline could have accurately been titled “Cocaine use is the leading cause of heart attacks,” instead they chose to go with the PM emissions caused by vehicles as the leading cause of heart attacks. An attention-grabber for sure; this would have been better suited to the National Enquirer.

But, wait; when I read in the study abstract about the funding behind it, it all became clear. As the saying goes, follow the money. The study was supposed to be focused on “air pollution” not “broad behavior that contributed to heart attacks” and was supported by a grant from the Flemish Scientific Fund and by the Sustainable Development Programme of BELSPO (Belgian Science Policy), two very green organizations. You pay for what you get.

Another reverse engineered study: We need results that confirm PM causes heart attacks, so let’s crunch all the “selected studies” facts and try to get some results to support this. As Albert Einstein said, “If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.”  The “theory” in this case is that vehicle emissions cause or contribute to every imaginable negative health effect on all people in all environments, specifically heart attacks. Because studies like these are part of the junk-science in public health that leads to over-regulation and unemployment, it’s more important now than ever to be aware of this propaganda.
Who today doesn’t believe that the air is cleaner now than the last 50 years?

Haven’t we spent hundreds of billions of dollars (and Euros) making vehicles and fuels cleaner?

When you read studies like these, you realize that they (the regulators and academics in the public health science community) will never stop this because their jobs and power depend on it.

When will the public smarten up and get sick of the continual “crying-wolf” enviro-academic propaganda, not to mention the wasteful public grant funds used for these studies?

As you can probably tell, I was done with them all years ago.

As a side note, I have to admit that I found it strange that at least secondhand smoke was not included in this study, but the authors were quick to add (without any proof) that the risks of this social activity was comparable to PM exposure from vehicle emissions. So, again, I had to wonder why didn’t these researchers include secondhand smoke as part of this study if it’s as deadly as we always hear.

Did you know that the soon-to-be-fired UCLA Professor (trained epidemiologist) James Enstrom published a study on secondhand smoke in 2003 utilizing the American Cancer Society (ACS) Cancer Prevention Study I or CPS-I (California based population cohort of 118,000) and found virtually no effects of second hand smoke on non-smoking spouses in California? That “published” study caused the public health community (especially ACS, ALA and not surprising UCLA) in the U.S. and Europe to begin an industry-wide crusade to get Professor Enstrom censored and fired. And it looks like they will soon get their wish.

And can you bet that over the last 8 years, the American Cancer Society has been unable to disprove Enstrom’s studies findings using their own data. Don’t you think that if his study’s results could be disproved, it would have been done immediately, but the fact is it hasn’t. So what does that tell you about this study and the lying, deceptive public health community behind it? Oh…and ACS and the American Lung Assoc. (ALA) are all part of this, make no mistake.

BMW’s Ad Manager Should be Fired

And while I’m on this “what-are-they-thinking-in-Europe” thing, I have to share with you the latest BMW commercial message. Several members have called to complain (negative emotions/anger, hopefully not heart attacks) about a BMW commercial currently being aired which features a diesel truck spewing heavy smoke (PM air pollution) both from the dual stacks and tactlessly from the driver’s mouth. Ironically, the message about this car is a new clean diesel engine that gets 20% better fuel economy than gas and is therefore “green.”

The truck used must be in high demand these days for advertising as it looks like the same one CARB uses on some of their posters and ads to demonstrate the need for the Truck/Bus Rule. We, of course, refer to this as propaganda. It has been many years since I have seen a truck like this on our highways, and most importantly, I resent this image being portrayed because this kind of smoke-spewing is illegal and not tolerated by anyone in our industry today.

Betty’s - Just Another Great Board Meeting

I would like to thank those of you who came to our recent Board meeting held in Sacramento on February 12th. This meeting was full of vital information from start to finish as we discussed our Broker Bond, Insurance Waivers and our lawsuit against CARB. It was great to see old friends and visitors, and we even welcomed a new Affiliate Member, Gary Bagwill, from Snider Leasing. Please remember to shop our Affiliate members for your trucking needs; they are listed by product and services in this magazine andon our website. It is vitally important in these tough economic times to support those who support CDTOA.