Spin of the Week

By PR Watch
Big Pharma warns smokers not to go "cold turkey" in stealth campaign
“Some public-health officials say [drug] industry-funded doctors are ignoring … studies that suggest cold turkey is just as effective or even superior to nicotine patches and other pharmaceuticals over the long run, not to mention cheaper,” reports Kevin Helliker. One example: Dr. Michael Fiore, who headed the panel that developed federal guidelines on smoking cessation, “runs an academic research center funded in part by drug companies that make quit-smoking aids” and has personally “received tens of thousands of dollars in speaking and consulting fees from those companies.” At least eight other members on the federal panel also “had ties to the makers of stop-smoking products,” such as GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer. The panel now revising the guidelines includes seven members with industry ties, including Fiore, who continues to head it. Health researcher Lois Biener pointed out that most smokers “who do quit successfully do so without” drugs. But the bias for patches and drugs is strong. “In November 2006, during the week of the Great American Smokeout, doctors around the country participated in a campaign called ‘Don’t Go Cold Turkey.’ the creator of the campaign was GlaxoSmithKline.”

SAIC: The very model of the Military-Industrial Complex

By PR Watch
SAIC: The very model of the Military-Industrial Complex
With 44,000 employees, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) “is larger than the [U.S.] departments of Labor, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development combined,” Donald Barlett and James Steele write, in an in-depth profile of the military contractor. “SAIC currently holds some 9,000 active federal contracts,” more than any other company. But “several of SAIC’s biggest projects have turned out to be colossal failures,” including “Trailblazer,” a system to manage incoming intelligence for the National Security Agency, and the “Virtual Case File,” a centralized data repository for the FBI. “SAIC executives have been involved at every stage … of the war in Iraq,” from pushing WMD claims to helping “investigate how American intelligence could have been so disastrously wrong.” Under “yet another no-bid contract,” SAIC created the Iraqi Media Network, supposedly a “free and independent indigenous media network” that quickly became “a mouthpiece for the Pentagon.” Eventually, “the network was turned over to Iraqi control. Today it is a tool of Iraq’s Shiite majority and spews out virulently anti-American messages.” Moreover, SAIC’s work on the Iraqi Media Network was criticized by the Pentagon’s Inspector General as having “widespread violations of normal contracting procedures.”

Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study

Not that it comes as a major surprise but it's always good to document.
BB


Ian Sample, science correspondent
Friday February 2, 2007
The Guardian


The Arctic habitat of polar bears is under threat as climate change causes ice to melt. Photograph: Joseph Napaaqtuq Sage/AP


Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.
Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).