Report on
Epidemiological Studies, Court Cases
FACT:
Results
of large study, published 2002: "We
found a rather remarkably low SMR (standardized
mortality ratio) for lung cancer among female
cabin attendants and no increase for male cabin
attendants, indicating that smoking and
exposure to passive smoking may not play an
important role in mortality in this group."
Smoking during airplane flights
was permitted in Germany until the mid-1990s and
smoking is still not banned on all charter
flights," stated the study, "Mortality
from Cancer and Other Causes Among Airline Cabin
Attendants in Germany, 1960-1997," from the
Department of Epidemiology and Medical
Statistics, School of Public Health, World Health
Organization Collaborating Center, University
Bielefeld, Germany, accepted for publication May
1, 2002, and published in the American Journal of
Epidemiology. The study claimed to be the first
to have reported mortality risk estimates for
cabin crews working in commercial aviation. It
included approximately 16,000 female and
4,500 male cabin attendants and was larger
than all previous studies of cabin attendants
combined. "In terms of specific
causes, we noted reduced risks for all
cancer deaths and for cardiovascular disease
deaths."
(See
abstract and full study)
FACT:
Result
of case study, published 2001: The ETS
levels in the nonsmoking area were compared with
those in similar restaurants/pubs where indoor
smoking is altogether prohibited. The results
indicate that ETS component
concentrations in the nonsmoking section of the
facility in question were not statistically
different (p<0.05)
from
those measured in similar facilities where
smoking is prohibited. The regulatory
implications of these findings are that
ventilation techniques for restaurants/pubs with
separate smoking and nonsmoking areas are capable
of achieving nonsmoking area ETS concentrations
that are comparable to those of similar
facilities that prohibit smoking outright,"
stated the study conducted in Ontario, Canada,
"Environmental Tobacco Smoke in the
Nonsmoking Section of a Restaurant: A Case
Study," published Nov. 20, 2001, Elsevier
Science.
(See full
study)
FACT:
"A
well-known toxicological principle
is that the poison is in the dose," said
Roger Jenkins, Chemical and Analytical Chemistry
Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
"It's pretty clear that the environmental
tobacco smoke dose is pretty low for most
people."
(See
article: Just how harmful is environmental
tobacco smoke? )
(See
article: Exposures to second-hand smoke lower
than believed, ORNL study finds)
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Report: Continued
FACT:
"Association
is NOT causation. Relative risks are only
statistical associations. They represent
only an apparent relationship between exposure
and disease. The relative risks of ETS
and lung cancer vary from extremely weak to
non-existent," stated Littlefield
& Fennell, Independent Public and Health
Policy Research, Austin., in "Environmental
Tobacco Smoke, No Convincing Evidence of
Carcinogenicity."
(See full report on forces.org at: http://www.forces.org/
evidence/download/fennel.pdf
(Full report, Page 40)
FACT:
Review:
In her book, "The Truth About the Drug
Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do
About It," published by Random House in
2004, Marcia Angell, M.D., senior lecturer in the
Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical
School and former Editor-in-Chief of the New
England Journal of Medicine, is quoted by
reviewer John Hoey, M.D., as stating the
following: Pharmaceutical Research and
Manufacturers of America, the pharmaceutical
industry's trade association has "the
largest lobby in Washington," which
in 2002 employed 675 lobbyists, including 26
former members of Congress, at a cost of more
than $91 million. The result has been above
average growth in corporate profits during both
Republican and Democratic administrations. The
most recent and perplexing lobbying effort caused
Congress explicitly to prohibit Medicare from
using its huge purchasing power to get lower
prices for drugs, thus opening up a dollar
pipeline, in the form of higher drug prices,
directly from taxpayers to corporate coffers. The
overall effect has been a corruption not only of
science but also of the dissemination of science.
By Angell's account, the current slide toward the
commercialization and corruption of clinical
research coincided with the election of President
Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the passage of the
Bayh-Dole Act, a new set of laws that permitted
and encouraged universities and small businesses
to patent discoveries from research sponsored by
the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Research
paid for by the public to serve the public
instantly became a private, and salable, good,
one that is producing drug sales of more than
$200 billion a year.
Angells reminds us of the increasingly cozy
relationships between big industry and the
facilities of universities. Not only are
narcissistic donors renaming the medical schools;
they are buying access to the best minds of their
facilities. Angell's examples of the
large consulting fees paid by industry to
individual faculty members and to NIH scientists
and directors are astonishing.
(See
Review)
|
Report: Continued
NEWS:
In her editorial, "Is
Academic Medicine For Sale?,"
Marcia Angell points out the increasing
difficulty the New England Journal of Medicine
had in finding physicians to review materials
that they didn't have a vested interest in
agreeing with the conclusions. She begins the
editorial with the following:
"In 1984 the Journal became the first
of the major medical journals to require authors
of original research articles to disclose any
financial ties with companies that make products
discussed in papers submitted to us. (1) We were
aware that such ties were becoming fairly common,
and we thought it reasonable to disclose them to
readers. Although we came to this issue early, no
one could have foreseen at the time just how
ubiquitous and manifold such financial
associations would become. The article by Keller
et al. (2) in this issue of the Journal provides
a striking example. The authors' ties with
companies that make antidepressant drugs were so
extensive that it would have used too much space
to disclose them fully in the Journal. We decided
merely to summarize them and to provide the
details on our Web site."
She goes on to say:
"In this
editorial, I wish to discuss the extent
to which academic medicine has become intertwined
with the pharmaceutical and biotechnology
industries, and the benefits and risks
of this state of affairs. Bodenheimer, in his
Health Policy Report elsewhere in this issue of
the Journal, (5) provides a detailed view of an
overlapping issue — the relations between
clinical investigators and the pharmaceutical
industry.
"The ties
between clinical researchers and industry include
not only grant support, but also a host of other
financial arrangements. Researchers
serve as consultants to companies whose products
they are studying, join advisory boards and
speakers' bureaus, enter into patent and royalty
arrangements, agree to be the listed authors of
articles ghostwritten by interested companies,
promote drugs and devices at company-sponsored
symposiums, and allow themselves to be plied with
expensive gifts and trips to luxurious settings.
Many also have equity interest in the
companies."
Sha slso discusses the following:
"Academic medical institutions are
themselves growing increasingly beholden to
industry. How can they justify rigorous
conflict-of-interest policies for individual
researchers when their own ties are so extensive?
Some academic institutions have entered
into partnerships with drug companies to set up
research centers and teaching programs in which
students and faculty members essentially carry
out industry research."
(See Angell
Editorial)
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