It’s almost baseball season, which means it’s time for anti-tobacco
extremists to start grabbing easy headlines.
One especially zealous state lawmaker wants to ban smokeless tobacco by
players and fans in all California ballparks (here). It’s all based on smoke and mirrors,
as illustrated in a woefully inaccurate recent BBC story on smokeless tobacco
and baseball.
The report includes an erroneous claim that baseball stars
Tony Gwynn, Curt Schilling and Babe Ruth died from cancers caused by smokeless
tobacco.
Neither Gwynn’s nor Schilling’s cancer was related to
smokeless products, as I have detailed before (here and here). Reporter Nada Tawfik concedes that “doctors
say a link between [Gwynn’s salivary] cancer and chewing tobacco cannot be
proven.” I have previously noted the
absence of a scientific link between smokeless tobacco and this cancer type
(here). As for Schilling, he never said he had mouth
cancer and not one of his doctors has supported his statement that
smokeless tobacco caused his illness.
The BBC repeated the decades-old myth that Babe Ruth
suffered from smokeless tobacco-induced mouth cancer. In truth, Ruth had nasopharyngeal carcinoma,
a rare disease caused by the Epstein-Barr virus. Ruth was a prodigious consumer of cigars and
alcohol, but neither are strongly associated with nasopharyngeal carcinoma
(discussed here). He also used smokeless tobacco, which
has no link to this cancer type.
Included in the BBC story was a remarkable quote attributed
to Dr. Jatin Shah, who runs the Head and Neck Service at New York’s Memorial
Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Chewing
tobacco, he is reported to have said, is “probably more harmful than smoking.” I emailed Dr. Shah to ask if he had been
misquoted. He responded with a comment
on South Asian products, but the BBC’s vast audience has been left with the
grossly erroneous impression that American smokeless tobacco is more dangerous
than cigarettes.
Thus are myths perpetuated and the public health undermined.