Alternative Analysis

On one of Cancer Research UK's (CRUK) blogs you can find a chart shows lung cancer rates
compared to smoking prevalence over the last few decades and on the face of it it is very convincing. But there is, I would suggest, more to it than meets the eye. The chart from the blog is shown next (top) along with a similar chart that I have produced...

If you take a look at the Wikipedia entry for lung cancer it has a helpful chart that plots US male lung cancer rates to cigarette consumption over a period of about 100 years. The correlation is very strong and convincing (see right). However, the USA...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a page showing the different lung cancer rates among races in the United States of America and the one for males is shown below.
source
It clearly shows that black males have the highest risk of lung cancer followed by white males and then Hispanics (and other groups) having the lowest risk. It is plausible that smoking has caused these cancers by some unknown mechanism and that some...

A while back I bought a packet of Rizla cigarette rolling papers and noticed that they were celebrating their 200 year existence.
I thought to myself that given that the modern lung cancer epidemic occurred in France after the second world war (as it did in every other country in the world) it is quite astonishing that any one could believe that something that became popular many...