Why did the committee only use the statistics from 13 small community studies rather than studies that have been carried out on whole populations?

Was it because the only studies to have found large effects of smoking bans on heart attacks are in very small communities and these results are therefore most likely due to chance? Every time a large population has been studied, there has either been no effect or such a small effect that it cannot be differentiated from the underlying trends in heart attacks, which have generally been declining, even in the absence of smoking bans.

The IOM claimed that it did not include studies from England, Scotland, Wales and Iceland that all showed no difference in the rate of hospital admissions for heart attacks and unstable angina (these countries all have nationwide smoking bans) because they were just unbiased admissions figures and not published for peer review.

However, they also failed to consider the peer-review study, published in the BMJ (http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/17/1/e2), of the results of the New Zealand smoking ban. It found that "There was no clear evidence of a short term effect on health or on adult smoking prevalence" Indeed, the incidence of hospital admissions for acute myocardial infarctions actually increased in the year following the ban.

There is a lot of SOLID scientific evidence showing that both smoking and second-hand smoke is bad for the health. This type of selective reporting of unfounded claims helps no-one.