So if I’m reading this right, for never smokers who lived in a house that used a woodstove between 1-29 days of the year have the same risk as smokers who used one everyday if the year?
An old wood stove is almost nothing (and I literally mean almost nothing) to a modern wood stove in efficiency or air cleanliness. It would almost be like if you did a study about the toxicity of cars but used data from when we had leaded gas. There’s still a toxicity there but your results are going to be a mess.
Research on whether dual burning stoves that reprocess their own exhaust and don’t leak like old ones (the ones you’re referring to) or other systems could be done, but this is baseline research.
You can use the same logic to attack the choice of fuels, or species of wood, or types of seals and whether air is taken from the inside or the outside of the structure, and all of it would also be as valid as your argument. You could also try to invalidate this for only focusing on women. But, while valid arguments (as is yours), it sidesteps the purpose of the study.
It’s simply not the hypothesis of this particular study, which was simply establish a correlation between the presence & use of wood burning fuel in fire burning devices and lung cancer incidence in women.
Don’t throw out the bathwater with the babe.
These kind of studies could indicate some flaw in the way we're creating wood stoves, or some consumer-related failure that needs to be better worked around. Or it could be that consumers are just using older wood stoves. But you gotta start with a baseline.
1. Women reporting more than 30 days of fireplace use per year (smokers and nonsmokers both included) had 68% more lung cancer than women reporting that their home didn't contain a fireplace (again, smokers and nonsmokers both included).
2. Non-smoking women reporting more than 30 days of fireplace use per year had 99% more lung cancer than non-smoking women reporting that their home didn't contain a fireplace.
3. Non-smoking women reporting 1-29 days of fireplace use per year had 64% more lung cancer than non-smoking women reporting that their home didn't contain a fireplace.
Not actually reported, but present by overwhelmingly strong implication:
1b. Women (without regard to ever-smoker status) reporting 1-29 days of fireplace use per year had no significant increase in lung cancer compared to women reporting that they didn't even have a fireplace. (Or else the results summary would have noted that they did.)
These are funny numbers with suspicious lacunae in the reporting of results. I'm not inclined to take them very seriously. At the same time, it is undoubtedly true that inhaling smoke is bad for you.
The study terminology always treats wood-burning stoves and fireplaces as equivalent. I would estimate that of the fixtures in the USA that are either wood-burning stoves or fireplaces, approximately 100% are fireplaces. This makes the study worthless if you want to draw conclusions about stoves, but OK for fireplaces. On the other hand, it doesn't really matter that the study won't let you draw conclusions about stoves, because there would be no point in having such conclusions.