Tobacco Company Paid For Cancer Study
By MedHeadlines • Mar 27th, 2008 • Category: Cancer, Medicare, Prevention, Smoking, Smoking CessationThe New York Times released a recent report regarding a connection between a tobacco company and a funded lung cancer study. In 2006, Dr. Claudia Henschke of Weill Cornell Medical College stunned the cancer world with her research suggesting that near 80% of lung cancer deaths could be prevented with the use of CT scans.
Since her support and research was released, the use of CT scans increased across the country and the world. Her study was partially funded by a small charity, the Foundation for Lung Cancer: Early Detection and Treatment. This small charity was not well known and did not attract attention until recently, as it now appears that the contribution to this charity was made by the Liggett Group. The Liggett Group makes cigarettes under the brands Eve, Grand Prix, Quest and Pyramids.
This recent discovery regarding the donated money raises questions about the research and the motivation behind it or supporting it. Cigarette makers are not viewed positively among the cancer community and health professionals were stunned when they discovered the connection.
Some are suggesting that this information was concealed from the public and from the medical profession.
In defense of the claims, supporters of the research study have stated that they needed to raise the funds to complete the study and that they no longer accept funding from tobacco sources.
cigarette company’s money = blood money
There is nothing fundamentally improper about a cigarette company funding research on early detection of a cancer that it helps to cause. I have no problem with a cigarette company helping to fund a study, so long as its involvement is clearly and conspicuously disclosed AND the tobacco industry does not use the findings for its own purposes without doing the same. Hiding sponsorship behind a charity that is not clearly associated with the tobacco industry, however, is guaranteed to create the appearance of impropriety and to damage the credibility of both the study and the investigators, no matter how innocent they are. All of this could have been prevented by simply identifying this source of funding as “The Liggett Group Foundation for Lung Cancer: Early Detection and Treatment,” along with the usual disclaimers that the funding agency exercised no role in the study design, data analysis, writing, or decision to publish.
There are plenty of bad things to say about the tobacco industry without also criticizing it for even a token effort to mitigate the damage that it causes.
I think it is curious that the foundation’s name is the “Foundation FOR Lung Cancer”