杏吧原创

WHEN the law firm Covington and Burling detailed the activities of the
consultants programme it had set up on behalf of Philip Morris, it didn鈥檛
identify any of the consultants by name.

However, some activities in the memo seem to tally with known events. For
instance, the report describes how an army of consultants would organise a
conference on indoor air pollution in Lisbon, to 鈥渟how the insignificance of ETS
[environmental tobacco smoke] by emphasising the genuine problems of air quality
in warm climates鈥�. A scientific conference fitting this description took place
the following year.

Elsewhere, the document mentions a consultant who published a book called
Follies and Fallacies in Medicine, describing the book as 鈥渁 clever and
entertaining way of suggesting that medical `certainties鈥� are frequently without
genuine scientific basis鈥�. The book was published by Prometheus in 1990. One of
its two authors was the late Petr Skrabanek, an epidemiologist at Trinity
College, Dublin. Other documents show that he also helped to write reports for
the tobacco industry.

The memo also mentions an unnamed consultant who was 鈥渆xamining the
feasibility of using autopsy data in Hungary to attack the reliability of lung
cancer diagnoses鈥�. A paper on this topic was published in 1996 in General
and Diagnostic Pathology (vol 141, p 169). Two of its authors were Francis
Roe, formerly of the Institute of Cancer Research in London, now retired, and
Peter Lee, listed on the paper as an independent consultant in statistics and
epidemiology based in Sutton, Surrey鈥攂oth named as advisers to the tobacco
industry in other documents.

Under the heading 鈥淏ird keeping鈥�, two consultants were said to be 鈥済uiding
research鈥� in the Netherlands and Scotland into the links between lung cancer and
keeping pet birds. Studies fitting this description, including some listing Lee
among their authors, were published throughout the 1990s.