Smokeless tobacco: the epidemiology and politics of harm
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The health burden from tobacco smoking results almost entirely from inhalation of the components of smoke, although this is not widely known. The primary benefit of smoking is nicotine delivery, but nicotine can be obtained without combustion. Thus there is potential for tobacco harm reduction (THR), the substitution of lower-risk nicotine products for smoking. Epidemiological evidence suggests that smokeless tobacco causes about one one-hundredth the health risk of smoking. Despite the practice of harm reduction being widely accepted in public health, however, THR has faced fierce opposition from antitobacco activists. These activists have effectively misled the public about what aspect of smoking cigarettes causes the harm, convincing them that nicotine and tobacco themselves are harmful, ignoring the smoke. In the interests of promoting public health and rescuing science from politics, experts on inhalation hazards and health could play an important role in educating the public and policy makers about THR.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".