Corporate manipulation of environmental health research: A comparison of four industries

The tobacco industry has attained notoriety not only through the lethality of its products, but also as a result of the release of over 40 million pages of internal industry documents as part of a number of legal settlements in the 1990's, most notably the Master Settlement Agreement with 46 State Attorneys General in 1996. These documents have been analyzed in over 490 peer-reviewed publications, books, and reports. Recently several other industry groups have been required to release to the public many of their internal documents as a result of litigation on the health effects of their products or manufacturing processes. The release of these documents provides an opportunity to examine from an insider's perspective the strategies each industry developed and used to manipulate research in ways that would enhance their credibility and support their bottom line. Using a previously developed framework, we compare the strategies used by the tobacco, lead, vinyl chloride and silicosis-generating industries (mining, foundries, sandblasting, and others) to manipulate research on environmental tobacco smoke, lead poisoning, cancer and other diseases, and silicosis. We hypothesize that the four industry groups used similar strategies to manipulate research, including funding and publishing research that supports their interests, suppressing and criticizing unfavorable research, and disseminating supportive research to policy makers and the lay press. We argue that corporate roles in the manipulation of research should be monitored, publicized, and made transparent.