The BMA admits it was wrong about smoking in cars – yet it is still making dubious claims

The BMA has been caught out (Photo: PA)

The British Medical Association has admitted that its claim that smoking in cars generates 23 times more toxins than you would find in a smoky bar is wrong. It included the claim in a press release issued yesterday, and the churnalists of the mainstream media, from respectable broadsheets to intemperate tabloids, repeated it without question. Yet as I argued in a post here yesterday, it is bunkum: last year a serious academic study for the Canadian Medical Association Journal said it  had "failed to locate any scientific source" for the idea that lighting up in cars produces secondhand smoke 23 times as potent as that found in a bar. Now, quietly, with no media fanfare, the BMA has corrected its press release. It now says: "The restrictive internal environment in motor vehicles could expose drivers and passengers to toxins up to 11 times greater than in a smoky bar."

But this is also a dubious claim. Can it really be the case that having a ciggie in a car exposes passengers to a climate 11 times nastier than you would find in a bar packed with people puffing on fags? Even one of the studies cited by the BMA as proof for this figure actually says something quite different. Published in the American Journal for Preventative Medicine, the study found that in a car with closed windows, smoking generated particulate concentrations of 272 micrograms per cubic metre of air, while in a car with its windows open smoking gave rise to just 51 micrograms per cubic metre. In bars, the figure was either similar (the study found 206 micrograms per cubic metre in smoky bars in Massachusetts) or it was significantly higher (reaching 412 micrograms per cubic metre in smoky bars in New York). Nowhere can I see hard evidence that smoking in cars generates 11 times the toxicity of a smoky bar.

It's time for the BMA to admit that its report demanding a ban on smoking in cars was a career low, a true jumping-of-the-shark for this busybody outfit determined to lecture the British populace. This is what happens when you opt for moralism over medicine and become more concerned with socially re-engineering the feckless masses than with boosting medical services. The BMA needs to butt out of our private lives and choices and go back to doing proper medicine, and the media should be more critical of nanny-state demands dressed up in pseudoscientific garb.