SACRAMENTO — Elisa Tong, an assistant professor of internal medicine, has been honored for her work in using tobacco industry documents to improve public awareness about the marketing practices and issues surrounding the nation's use of tobacco.
As part of its National Conference on Tobacco or Health in Minneapolis last week, the American Legacy Foundation honored Tong and two others for their use of tobacco industry documents to educate the public about tactics that tobacco companies have employed to attract and addict smokers to tobacco products.
Tong received a Sybil G. Jacobs Adult Award for her work with industry documents that began even before the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library was established at UC San Francisco. Her paper published in The Lancet in 2000, which focused on tobacco industry efforts to subvert the International Agency for Research on Cancer's secondhand smoke study, has been recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) and led WHO to strengthen its conflict-of-interest rules when dealing with the tobacco industry. Her later work has been influential beyond tobacco control, influencing the environmental and public policy areas.
Most recently, in a special report published in the Oct. 16 issue of the journal Circulation, Tong, along with co-author Stanton A. Glantz from UC San Francisco, used industry documents to reveal how the tobacco industry initially worked to fight smoke-free regulations by questioning the scientific evidence about the harmful effects of secondhand smoke. Their report also suggested that tobacco company-funded studies were conducted to support the development of the so-called “reduced-harm” cigarette.
Each year the Legacy Foundation honors individuals who make positive and innovative use of documents in the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, a collection that now provides permanent Internet access to millions of once-secret tobacco industry documents. The foundation is a national public health organization devoted to keeping young people from smoking and helping all smokers quit.