Philip Morris Cooked Study To Delink 2nd-Hand Smoke, SIDS - In 2001

[hatrack]

"Researchers at UCSF reviewing once-secret industry documents have detailed an elaborate effort by a leading tobacco company to raise doubts among doctors and public health officials about the well-established link between secondhand smoke and sudden infant death syndrome.

The UCSF analysis shows how, in one case, executives at Philip Morris International hired a consultant to write a scientific article on the causes of SIDS, and persuaded him to change his original conclusions so the article called into question the connection to secondhand smoke. The article, published in 2001 in a respected medical journal, has been cited at least 19 times by other scientific papers, which meant it was taken seriously by medical researchers and, ultimately, the UCSF researchers say, was used to mislead doctors and public health officials about the risks of secondhand smoke.

The tobacco companies "have this strategy to exert a subtle but very important influence over the research. It is designed to get the whole medical literature off in the wrong direction," said Stanton Glantz, a UCSF professor of medicine and senior author of the analysis.

The analysis is based on once- confidential tobacco industry documents that were made public as a result of a landmark 1998 settlement of lawsuits brought by 46 states to pay for the costs of smoking-related health care. The settlement also makes public industry documents that are disclosed as part of ongoing litigation."

EDIT

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/03/07/MNGOTBLIJ31.DTL