6 November 2001

INDUSTRY SPONSORS "SOUND SCIENCE"

"Public health professionals need to be aware that the 'sound science' movement is not an indigenous effort from within the profession to improve the quality of scientific discourse, but reflects sophisticated public relations campaigns controlled by industry executives and lawyers whose aim is to manipulate the standards of scientific proof to serve the corporate interests of their clients."

This is not just a highly pertinent point to the debate over genetic engineering, but to so many other issues that impinge on major corporate interests. It comes from Glantz et al's follow up article to their famous study of tobacco industry subversion published in the Lancet.
[http://www.electric-words.com/junk/glantz/glantz.html]

Below is a brief summary of the new article courtesy of PR Watch
[http://www.prwatch.org/].
The full article (url below) includes reference to the European Science and Environment Forum - a key source of anti-organic attacks
[see: https://members.tripod.com/~ngin/rightwing.htm]
- and the uncanny similarity between the Guest Choice Network (aka nannyculture.com - another aggressively pro-GM/anti-organic PR effort) and the Big Tobacco funded TASSC project which gave rise to Steven Milloy's Junkscience.com

For more on Guest Choice:
https://members.tripod.com/~ngin/JM065.htm

For more on Milloy and Big Tobacco
http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2000Q3/junkman.html

Among the Big Tobacco-funded fronts for corporations which escape mention in the article is the Competitive Enterprise Institute which has played such a key role in Prakash's pro-GE campaigning - see:
https://members.tripod.com/~ngin/11101b.htm

The CEI in its campaign against government efforts to discourage smoking even encouraged people to smoke as a token of regulatory-resistance because, as the CEI so notably puit it, "there are things more valuable than health".

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Tobacco industry sponsors "sound science"

http://www.ajph.org/cgi/content/full/91/11/1749

Summary: Doctors Elisa Ong and Stanton A. Glantz have published a study documenting the tobacco industry's attack on so-called "junk science" to discredit the evidence that secondhand smoke -- among other environmental toxins -- causes disease. "Philip Morris used public relations firms and lawyers to develop a 'sound science' program in the United States and Europe that involved recruiting other industries and issues to obscure the tobacco industry's role," they write. "The European 'sound science' plans included a version of 'good epidemiological practices' that would make it impossible to conclude that secondhand smoke, and thus other environmental toxins, caused diseases. Public health professionals need to be aware that the 'sound science' movement is not an indigenous effort from within the profession to improve the quality of scientific discourse, but reflects sophisticated public relations campaigns controlled by industry executives and lawyers whose aim is to manipulate the standards of scientific proof to serve the corporate interests of their clients." SOURCE: America Journal of Public Health, November 2001