Examination of Witnesses (Questions 134-139)
DR STEVE
STOTESBURY, MS
CHRISTINE MOHRMANN
AND MR
BARRY JENNER
20 OCTOBER 2005
Q134 Chairman: Good morning. Could I
welcome you and thank you for facilitating this earlier start
than we originally planned for your evidence session. I do not
have to introduce the Committee. Dr Stotesbury, I wonder if you
could introduce yourself, and if your colleagues could as well
for the record.
Dr Stotesbury: I am Dr Steve Stotesbury
and I am Industry Affairs Manager for Imperial Tobacco and I am
a qualified analytical chemist.
Mr Jenner: Good morning. My name
is Barry Jenner. I am the Managing Director for the UK Business
Division for Gallaher Group plc.
Ms Mohrmann: My name is Christine
Mohrmann. Iam the Corporate Affairs Manager for Philip Morris
Ltd. Philip Morris Ltd is the affiliate of Philip Morris International
in the UK.
Chairman: Thank you very much. My colleague
DrNaysmith is going to open the questions.
Q135 Dr Naysmith: Dr Stotesbury,
you state in your memorandum that you submitted to the Committee
that the scientific evidence for the harmful effects of second-hand
smoke is "flawed" and that the risk to non-smokers of
second-hand smoke is small and impossible to measure. What evidence
do you have to support that?
Dr Stotesbury: I would like to
say from the outset that I do not feel the evidence is flawed.
I do not think I said that in my submission.
Q136 Dr Naysmith: I think that is
a quote. It may be that it is somewhere else you said it.
Dr Stotesbury: I believe that
the scientific evidence, if you take it as a whole—and that
includes the lung cancer, heart disease and chronic bronchitis—is
currently insufficient to establish that other people's tobacco
smoke is a cause of any disease.
Q137 Dr Naysmith: You think the Royal
College and the Scottish Executive have got the science badly
wrong, in that they believe the evidence does—as you just
heard from the previous session.
Dr Stotesbury: Yes, I heard what
was said in the previous session. I believe to date there have
been something like 70 different epidemiological studies on the
effects of environmental tobacco smoke and lung cancer and around
30 in relation to heart disease. The vast majority of those failed
to come to any statistically significant conclusion as to the
relationship between ETS (environmental tobacco smoke) and disease.
A few, a small minority, have come to the conclusion that there
is an increase in risk and association between ETS and disease,
but a few have come to the opposite conclusion. The vast majority
have been inconclusive.
Q138 Dr Naysmith: What about the
suggestion that was given in evidence in the previous session
that, predicting backwards from the known effects of inhaling
tobacco smoke directly, gives you almost clear evidence that it
is bound to be true that passive smoke causes some harmful effects?
I took that to be one of the things that was said previously?
Dr Stotesbury: Yes, that was one
of the things that was said.
Q139 Dr Naysmith: What do you think
about that?
Dr Stotesbury: I disagree with
that.
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