---Original Message-----

Friday March 28 2008

To: Simpson RA (Richard), MSP

Subject: Your quote in The Herald

Dear Dr Simpson,

You have been quoted in The Herald as saying "A study published last autumn revealed the number of heart attacks treated in nine major Scottish hospitals fell by 17% the year after the law was introduced."

You were clearly referring to a study by Dr Jill Pell which was widely reported last year. In fact, this study has never been published and NHS statistics show that there was not a fall in heart attacks of anything like the magnitude of 17% after the smoking ban came in in Scotland. The Times has since listed the report in its end-of-year 'Worst Junk Stats of 2007'.

Assuming you were not misquoted, I was troubled that a man in your position would make these mistakes but I will assume good faith on your part. Although your comments will have misled readers of The Herald into believing that (a) The Jill Pell study has been published and (b) heart attack incidence fell by 17% after the smoking ban, I will also assume there was no intention on your part to do so.

Can I have your assurance that you and your department will not repeat these false statements?

Regards

Chris Snowdon

I did not receive a reply and so five days later sent another e-mail...

-Original Message-----

Wed. April 2nd 2008

To: Simpson RA (Richard), MSP

Subject: Your quote in The Herald (again)

Dr Simpson,

I wrote to you last Friday to seek clarification over some comments you made to The Herald. As I explained, your statement that a study has been published showing a dramatic fall in heart attacks after the smoking ban took effect in Scotland is simply false. No such study has ever been published.

I said previously that I assume you act in good faith, however your failure to respond when someone points out that you have misled the public, and your apparent reluctance to correct a factual error, gives me cause for doubt. My question is quite simple - Was it your intention to deliberately mislead the public or were you merely ignorant of the facts?

Regards

Chris Snowdon

A few hours after sending my second e-mail I received this terse response...

---Original Message-----

Richard.Simpson.MSP@scottish.parliament.uk wrote:

Chris

my understanding is that the 'admissions' to A&E dropped by 17%

is this not correct it is certainly bandied about by ministers

Richard Simpson

Clearly, Dr Simpson had not gone to the effort of checking the facts behind the Scottish heart attack miracle. That was not surprising, he's a busy man, but it was worrying that he was being fed misinformation and that other ministers were being fed the same nonsense. I sent back a reply:

---Original Message-----

To: Simpson RA (Richard), MSP

Subject: RE: Your quote in The Herald

Dr Simpson,

Thank you for your reply. If this figure is indeed still being 'bandied around' by ministers then it is a tribute to the coverage given when this claim was first made but it is troubling nonetheless. Since this claim was first made, actual statistics from ISD Scotland have shown it to be nonsense.

Heart attacks fell in the year after the ban just as they did in the year before the ban and for many years before that. But there was not a fall of 17%, nor anything approaching 17%.

The claim was first made at a public health conference in September 2007 but the study involved has never been published, nor does it seem likely that it ever will since its whole premise has been demolished. The Times included it in its list of 'Top 10 Junk Stats of 2007' and the BBC have published an expose of the whole affair entitled 'When the facts get in the way of a good story' (links below).

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article3085272.ece

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7093356.stm

To quote from the BBC piece:

"It was dramatic research that made headlines everywhere. A 17% fall in the number of heart attacks in the year since Scotland stubbed out smoking in public places. Startling - if true.

Few questioned the research when it was revealed two months ago. Politicians trumpeted the numbers as vindication of a policy introduced a year earlier than in England. Journalists obediently followed suit. The most arresting finding was that heart attacks among non-smokers had apparently fallen even faster than smokers, suggesting that passive smoking was often to blame.

Then a week ago, with rather less fanfare, routine statistics on hospital activity were published by the official source for health data in Scotland, as they are every year, this time including the time since the ban. These show a fall in heart attacks for the year from March 2006 - not of 17%, but less than half as much at about 8%. What's more, taking out the recent trend, this is halved again....

But because the data on which the StopIt study was based has never been published, and nor has the study itself, it is impossible to say exactly how it was done. Attempts to obtain it or to talk to the lead researcher have gone unanswered.

Once the number was out, politicians were certainly not about to exercise any scientifically-minded reservations about its reliability. The story became political as much as medical."

Despite all this, it seems that you and others have been led to believe that not only did the smoking ban lead to a dramatic fall in heart attack incidence but that a scientific study has been published that proves this. Both of these beliefs are flatly, demonstrably false and it is troubling that there are people in positions of power who are touting these myths as reality.

As I said before, I assume you act in good faith in your comments to the press and it seems you have simply been misled. No one can be expected to check and double check everything they are told (it so happens that 'junk science' is one of my areas of academic interest, so I do) but you should be able to trust the information you are given.

I appreciate that smoking is a hot topic amongst public health professionals at the moment but we are on a dangerous road indeed if we allow popular legend to prevail over science. I would welcome your comments.

Regards

Chris Snowdon

Two hours later I received this brief, somewhat incoherent and very final e-mail:

---Original Message-----

To: Simpson RA (Richard), MSP

Subject: RE: Your quote in The Herald

Chris

your point is noted

however the slope of the decrease for many years before the ban was 4% after as evidence published in the BMJ for Ireland showed significant health improvements and an increase in the gradient of the slope...we can argue about the precise figure but there can be no doubt about the direction of travel

as they would say in a chat room iam now opting out of this thread

Richard Simpson

I did not reply to this e-mail. I didn't want to keep Dr Simpson away from his chat rooms (where basic punctuation is evidently not a requirement). For the record, the "direction of the travel" has been downwards since the 1970s and as I have shown elsewhere, there was nothing unusual about the rate of decline after the smoking ban. Dr Smith does, at least, seem to have accepted that there was no 17% drop and that the Pell paper has not been published. Such is the sorry state of the intellectual climate around smoking these days that even a tacit retraction of an obvious falsehood can be regarded as some sort of achievement. But do not expect your political masters to correct the misinformation in public, let alone apologise. If you get a reply at all you should expect to be told, as I was in not so many words: "You're right, but I don't care. Go away."