REVEALING internal documents from cigarette company British American Tobacco will go on a public website, after scientists got fed up with fighting the firm to see them.
BAT was forced by a US legal settlement in 1998 to allow public access to 8 million pages of documents, which it placed in an archive in Guildford, UK. But researchers from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and elsewhere claim the firm has hindered people’s efforts to view the files, and used questionable surveillance methods on visitors (The Lancet, vol 363, p 2004).
Alleged tactics include using video cameras and recording details of visitors’ file searches. And researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine say 180 files have mysteriously vanished from the archive’s index.
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The team painstakingly ordered photocopies of all 40,000 remaining files, and have started putting them on a website scheduled for launch in September and completion by 2006.
Kelley Lee, one of the LSHTM team, says the files contain important information about BAT’s marketing strategies, which will be vital for reducing smoking rates in the developing world. “These are very relevant documents for stemming this current pandemic,” she says.
