14 DAY TRIAL // A scientific paper published in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed journal PLoS Medicine indicates that the Philip Morris USA corporation had a hand in manipulating the fact about additives it puts in its cigarettes. The research demonstrates that the company misled the public and authorities.
Actual toxicity levels were obscured or diminished, and some of the additives were presented in a much more favorable light than they deserved. At the same time, Philip Morris downplayed the health risks smokers subject themselves to when lighting their cigarettes.
Smoking is known to increase lung, throat and mouth cancer risk, as well as make people more susceptible to developing heart diseases. The new investigation was carried out by scientists at the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF), Science Blog reports.
The main conclusion the team arrived at is that the information provided willingly by the tobacco industry cannot be trusted or taken at face value. The UCSF experts say that public health grounds should lead to tobacco companies being forced to remove hundreds of additives from their products.
The original data used in this research came from Project MIX, a study conducted by Philip Morris back in 2002. The goal of the analysis was to conduct a chemical analysis of smoke produced by cigarettes, as well as a toxicological analysis of some 333 additives.
The UCSF team determined that the toxicity of cigarette smoke increased considerably after the additives were mixed in. These increases were obscured willingly when tobacco scientists working for the United States' largest cigarette manufacturer presented the results.
“We discovered these post-hoc changes in analytical protocols after the industry scientists found that the additives increased cigarette toxicity by increasing the number of fine particles in the cigarette smoke that cause heart and other diseases,” explains Stanton A. Glantz, PhD.
The expert – who was the senior author of the new study – holds an appointment as a professor of medicine at UCSF, and is also the director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the university.
“When we conducted our own analysis by studying additives per cigarette – following Philip Morris’ original protocol – we found that 15 carcinogenic chemicals increased by 20 percent or more,” the investigator goes on to say.
The company conducted its study on small samples, the team adds, and this goes a long way towards explaining why they could not, or would not, see the increase in cigarette smoke toxicity.
“The experiment was too small in terms of the number of rats analyzed to statistically detect important changes in biological effects. Philip Morris underpowered its own studies,” Glantz concludes.