Is BUMC marketing for Philip Morris?

• Tobacco is STILL the leading cause of preventable death in the USA (~400,000 deaths/year from smoking), more than 40 years after the Surgeon General's report on the negative health effects of smoking.
• Smoking kills more people than alcohol, AIDS, car accidents, illegal drugs, murders, and suicides combined.
• Since 1998, Altria (Philip Morris) has spent more on lobbing Congress than any other business.
  
• Boston University Medical Center (BUMC) received $3.99 million from Philip Morris USA over the past decade to fund the study of tobacco-related illnesses ("Tobacco funded Mass. research", Boston Globe, March 2008).
  

On Monday (Dec. 8th), Dr. Alan Blum - the Gerald Leon Wallace Endowed Chair in Family Medicine at the University of Alabama - spoke to BU medical and public health students about the controversy surrounding university research funded by big tobacco companies. His talk, "Universities 
and 
the
 Tobacco
 Industry:
 True 
Opponents
 or
 Silent
 Partners?
", focused on the role that student advocates can play in reducing the negative health effects of smoking, especially by directly confronting the tobacco companies that produce, market, and distribute the product.

As a resident, Dr. Blum started DOC (Doctors Ought To Care), a national organization focusing on school-based and community wide health promotion, for which he received the first National Public Health Award from the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP).

Further coverage of the event can be found at...

• "BU forum turns spotlight on tobacco company-funded research -- including its own" (Boston Globe)
• "Tobacco funding slammed" (BU Daily Free Press)
• "Medical Research by the Marlboro Man" (BU Today)