Many Medical Schools Still Profit from Ties to Tobacco Industry [11/15-4]

Excerpts from: Many Medical Schools Remain Invested in Tobacco Stocks, Report Says

By KATHERINE S. MANGAN The Chronicle [11/19/04]


Medical schools continue to profit from their ties to the tobacco industry.

Many schools remain invested in tobacco stocks 17 years after the American Medical Association urged the institutions to divest their holdings, according to researchers at the University of California at San Francisco School of Nursing.

The industry giant Philip Morris USA persuaded some medical schools to hold on to their tobacco stocks and others to be quiet about divesting. The company reminded them of the research money Philip Morris had put into the schools, hinting that it could withhold further support, said the report, which is based on an analysis of internal tobacco-company documents. The report is in the November issue of Academic Medicine, the journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges.

"It's clearly a conflict of interest for medical schools to profit from something that kills 440,000 people every year in this country alone," says Ruth E. Malone, an associate professor of nursing and health policy at the nursing school and lead author of the study. The co-author is Nathaniel Wander, a research associate of Ms. Malone's in the nursing school's department of social and behavioral sciences.

The report examines Philip Morris's alleged influence on two 1991 divestment decisions.

The corporation tried to sway the medical schools of the Johns Hopkins University, which divested its tobacco stock, and Yale University, which did not, according to the report. Philip Morris hinted that it might withhold research money, funds for endowed chairs, or other financial contributions, the report says. Even though Johns Hopkins chose to divest, it did so without a public announcement. (Johns Hopkins officials say they did, in fact, issue a news release after a local newspaper broke the story.)

The American Medical Association divested its tobacco holdings in 1986. The following year it urged medical schools and their universities to do the same. But as of August 2004, the parent universities of at least 5 of the 12 top-ranked American medical schools -- Cornell University, Duke University, the University of Pennsylvania, Washington University in St. Louis, and Yale University -- had not divested, the researchers found.


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