
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, July 3, 1994                   TAG: 9407030009
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

TOBACCO FIRMS SAY SCIENTISTS SKEWING DATA

The tobacco industry says it's being victimized by biased scientists who skew data to make it falsely appear that smoke - yours or somebody else's - is bad for you.

And it's spending millions of dollars in advertising to take that message to vulnerable Americans already reeling from scandals involving cancer and radiation research.

"The general public has a skepticism about the results of scientific inquiry and they're playing on that," said Dr. Morton Lippman of New York University Medical Center.

The tobacco industry is facing increasing hostility: The Justice Department is investigating it for fraud and perjury, indoor smoking bans are on the rise and the government wants to regulate nicotine.

So it's fighting back through full-page newspaper ads. Once a week, R.J. Reynolds says smoking is no worse than caffeine or fatty hamburgers and spreads dire warnings that the government wants to ban all cigarettes - even in private homes.

Philip Morris capped off a weeklong attack with a three-page ad in 40 Sunday newspapers that charged the Environmental Protection Agency with using seriously flawed science to label secondhand smoke a carcinogen.

Scientists say the ads aren't truthful but they don't have big enough wallets to counterattack. The companies won't say how much they're spending, but a single full-page ad in the Sunday Washington Post costs $64,000.

"Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for an industry to be able to outspend the public interest," said Jeff Cohen of the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

So what's real and what's smoke?

R.J. Reynolds says the government will ban all smoking. Congress and Food and Drug Commissioner David Kessler insist that's not true. Instead, they may regulate the amount of nicotine in cigarettes.

R.J. Reynolds says smoking is a habit no worse than caffeine. But Kessler says nicotine hooks people, enough that smoking kills 400,000 Americans a year.

Philip Morris is reprinting an article by a media critic that claims the EPA, in labeling secondhand smoke a carcinogen, used invalid studies and skewed statistics, calling a study significant when it had only a 90 percent chance of accuracy instead of the usual 95 percent chance.

These are old arguments, ones that a panel of nine independent scientists, headed by Lippman, found without basis more than a year ago.

Still, the EPA issued an unprecedented defense last week. It insisted that 24 of the 30 studies it used linked secondhand smoke tocancer and nine were statistically significant.

The statistics are tricky, but using a 90 percent "confidence interval" is OK when scientists are sure a substance won't have a particular effect, said Dr. Ron Davis, editor of the international journal Tobacco Control. In other words, no one says secondhand smoke is good. So 90 percent was enough to detect either no effect or a bad one, and was the same level EPA used to label radon and dioxin dangerous.

But the EPA says even if it threw out the studies that used the 90 percent level, it would still have enough evidence that secondhand smoke causes cancer.

"Not only is [the industry's] argument wrong, it's a very misleading argument because it implies the whole report hinges on that and it doesn't at all," agreed Davis. "They like to sow the seeds of doubt in people's minds so they think there is a controversy."

And the EPA notes that critics don't dispute its findings that secondhand smoke sickens at least 150,000 children a year with asthma, bronchitis and other diseases. In fact, a recent RJR ad seemed to back up the EPA: "Clearly common sense should tell everyone not to expose very young children to high levels of secondhand smoke," the ad said.

But Philip Morris is having an impact. In three days, it logged 3,000 telephone calls seeking reprints of its EPA ads.

Company Vice President Steve Parrish says he doesn't care how many independent scientists back EPA, he'll never believe secondhand smoke is bad.

"If EPA's so sure of the report, why doesn't it go back and answer our questions and publish the results?" he asked. "It's time for them to look at the data and not what happens to be politically correct."

by CNB