The University of Louisville’s Professor Brad Rodu has said that the US Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) is persisting in misleading the public on its website, according to a piece on rodutobaccotruth.blogspot.com, relayed by the TMA.
Rodu’s complaint is that the CTP uses its website to say that ‘…tobacco use continues to be the leading cause of preventable death and disease in the United States”.
This is despite the fact that CTP ‘bureaucrats know that smoking, not tobacco, is a leading cause of death and disease’, Rodu points out.
Citing an FDA statement on its website that it will ‘use the full power of the law to protect consumers from the dangers of tobacco use’, Rodu questions who will protect consumers from the FDA if it conflates ‘smoking’ and ‘smoke-free tobacco use’.
Rodu said an online search for the term ‘leading cause’ in articles published in Nicotine and Tobacco Research over the past decade had yielded 456 articles, of which 213 cited the FDA’s statement about the leading cause of disease or death.
About 40 percent of the articles had used the terms ‘tobacco use’ or ‘tobacco’ interchangeably with ‘smoking’.
Rodu said ‘tobacco prohibitionists willfully obscure the scientific truth that smoke-free tobacco products are associated with minuscule health risks’, but when government employees used the same tactics to ‘obscure the scientific truth’, he added, they were defying the FDA’s mission and misusing taxpayer dollars.