Velvet Glove, Iron Fist: Asthma and the smoking ban: Find the decline

Velvet Glove, Iron Fist: Asthma and the smoking ban: Find the decline


One of my favourite bloggers, staunch freedom advocate Chris Snowdon, has written a superb debunking of a daft, highly disingenuous and badly broken study claiming that childhood asthma rates dropped after the introduction of the smoking ban.

'I suggest to you, dear reader, that most people who read about the "sharp fall in the number of children admitted to hospital with severe asthma" would have assumed that the number of children admitted to hospital with severe asthma fell sharply in an actual year, not in a hypothetical year which exists in the imagination of a man who Dick Puddlecote has described, with some justification, as "the foremost anti-smoking crank on the planet". But then maybe I'm very old fashioned.'

Ye-ouch. Superb analysis, Mr Snowdon.