Report reveals big tobacco's tactics

BANGKOK, Thailand — Two of the world's largest tobacco companies, seeking to expand sales into Asia, worked to undermine anti-smoking policies in Thailand and China by infiltrating one research institute and funding another, researchers said Tuesday.

The allegations — highlighted in two separate studies — come as tobacco companies are aggressively marketing cigarettes in the developing world as lawsuits and anti-smoking laws hit revenues in the West.

"As the high-income countries put more and more obstacles in the path of the cigarette companies, they have to look for new markets," said Edouard Tursan d'Espaignet, epidemiologist with the WHO's Tobacco Free Initiative.

Critics said tobacco companies are trying to drum up sales by minimizing the dangers of smoking.

In Thailand, Philip Morris, the world's largest cigarette maker, planted a scientist in Chulabhorn Research Institute in Bangkok in a bid to get researchers to shift their attention from secondhand smoke and toward other forms of air pollution, according to one study. Public-health researchers from the University of Sydney and the University of Edinburgh produced the study by analyzing internal industry documents made public following litigation in the United States.

A separate study alleges that British American Tobacco, the world's second-largest firm, paid for the Beijing Liver Foundation's campaign in China to shift focus from links between smoking and ailments such as liver disease.

Both companies denied the charges presented online in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal. The two studies were partly funded by the National Cancer Institute in the United States.

However, longtime anti-smoking advocate Stanton Glanz said the tactics are "part of long-running and continuing tactics by the tobacco industry all over the world," and he called on the two Asian institutions to end their ties with the industry.

Anti-smoking groups say big tobacco for years has sought to covertly influence western government smoking policies and squash scientific findings highlighting hazards of smoking.

Now, some charge, the tobacco companies are taking these time-tested tactics to Asia, Africa and Latin America where the WHO estimates 80 percent of the 8 million tobacco-related deaths will occur by 2030.