To the editor:

I really don’t know where Michelle Miller gets her statistics of 53,000 dead from second-hand smoke.

In its December 1992 report, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates 3,000 deaths a year occur, based on nicotine measurements in nonsmokers’ blood, which “would translate to the equivalent of about one-fifth of a cigarette per day.”

Studies that measured actual exposure by having nonsmokers wear monitors indicate even this low estimate is exaggerated. Actual exposure (for people who live and/or work in smoky environments) is about six cigarettes per year.

According to the Congressional Research Service, “The studies relied primarily on questionnaires to the case and control members, or their surrogates, to determine SHS exposure and other information pertinent to the studies.”

Questionnaires can be notoriously inaccurate, but in this case some of them were not even filled out by the people being studied, but by “surrogates.” In other words, some of the information was unverified hearsay.

EPA’s explanations make it clear that using standard methodology, it could not produce statistically significant results with its selected studies. Analysis conducted with a .05 significance level and 95 percent confidence level included relative risks of 1. Accordingly, these results did not confirm EPA’s controversial hypothesis. In order to confirm its hypothesis, EPA maintained its standard significance level but lowered the confidence interval to 90 percent.

There are many more statistics Ms. Miller and I could both quote, so why don’t we simply apply that most American of adages, “Live and let live.”

Robert M. Tyler,

Ozawkie