Geoffrey C. Kabat is an American epidemiologist, cancer researcher, and author. He has been on the faculty of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and State University of New York, Stony Brook. He is the author of Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology and Getting Risk Right: Understanding the Science of Elusive Health Risks.
Scientific work
Over a forty-year career, Kabat has studied a wide range of lifestyle, clinical, and environmental exposures in relation to cancer and other diseases, and mortality. Major topics of interest include: smoking, alcohol consumption, diet and nutrition, endogenous and exogenous hormones, obesity and height, the metabolic syndrome, physical activity, electromagnetic fields, and sleep. In 2003, Kabat, who then worked at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, co-authored a study in BMJ examining the association between passive smoking and tobacco-related mortality. The study concluded that its results "do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality." The study was partly funded by the tobacco industry and was heavily publicized by it, and was criticized for using a dataset that did not include an "unexposed" group. In his book Hyping Health Risks, Kabat describes the criticism of this study as scientific McCarthyism.
Books
Kabat is the author of the book Hyping Health Risks, published in 2008 by Columbia University Press. The book examines several alleged environmental health risks, such as the proposed link between artificial chemicals and cancer, and concludes that these risks have been distorted. In the book, Kabat also discusses the science relating to the adverse health effects of passive smoking, arguing that anti-smoking activists have manipulated the results of scientific studies to justify increasingly stringent anti-smoking regulations. Skeptical Inquirer notes that "Kabat... helps readers understand relative versus absolute risk, medical research, how pseudoscientific and questionable claims get reported by news media and activists...." David A. Savitz reviewed the book and wrote "For the most part, the story of truth and misrepresentation of evidence on health risks was engaging". It was also reviewed in the New EnglandJournal of Medicine, where Barbara Gastel wrote that "Kabat is at his best in the chapters in which he presents the case studies," but she criticized the book's first chapter, entitled "Introduction: Toward a Sociology of Health Hazards in Daily Life". In a more negative review, Neil Pearce wrote in the International Journal of Epidemiology that he "became more frustrated and less impressed as worked way through the book" and criticized the book for what he called its "lack of balance". Terence Hines wrote that Kabat "more than accomplishes" his goals of discovering how it is that extraordinary progress is made solving some problems but little is made solving others and why instances of progress get little attention while scientifically questionable issues get more attention. Hines said of the chapter reviewing the question of whether cell phones cause cancer, it "alone is worth the price of the book." Kabat wrote another book building on the themes in Hyping Health Risks that was published in 2016.
