A leading medical information company has been urged to cancel a series of new education courses on smoking cessation funded by the tobacco industry giant Philip Morris International (PMI).
Physicians and academics have rounded on Medscape for partnering with PMI on five courses launched in the past few months, and they have called for stricter oversight by certification bodies.
Anna Gilmore, professor of public health and director of the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath, UK, said that Medscape had “now lost all credibility and has some serious questions to answer. PMI lost all credibility decades ago, despite its ceaseless and highly misleading attempts to rehabilitate its image. It has now sunk to a new low.”
Medscape has temporarily taken down some of the courses while it carries out a review, but it told The BMJ that it had so far “found no evidence of deviation from Medscape’s strict quality and integrity standards.”
The outcry centres on the
Proposed legislation aims to phase out smoking, but we must prevent it being blocked, diluted, or delayed through industry interference
The UK prime minister’s call for a smoke-free generation, which follows similar measures in New Zealand,1 would have been unimaginable for previous Conservative leaders. Rishi Sunak’s two immediate predecessors, Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, have already argued against the plan.23 Their comments are likely to be a precursor of a major campaign, led by the tobacco industry and the thinktanks it funds, to undermine this proposal. Such groups may well be feeling increasingly confident after the new coalition government scrapped New Zealand’s smoke-free plans a move causing widespread dismay among health experts and dubbed “catastrophic” for Māori communities.4
To prevent the UK legislation which will progressively increase the age at which tobacco products can be bought from being watered down or similarly abandoned, it is essential that polit
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