Pig's blood in cigarette filters: How a single news release highlighted tobacco industry concealment of cigarette ingredients

Abstract

The tobacco industry is not obligated to disclose ingredients and additives used in manufactured tobacco production. This paper describes global reaction to a press release highlighting evidence that porcine haemoglobin ("pig's blood") was sometimes used in cigarette manufacturing while never being disclosed to smokers. The case study illustrates the power of press releases to ignite major interest in tobacco control issues.

Full text

Pig’s blood in cigarette filters: how a single news
release highlighted tobacco industry concealment of
cigarette ingredients
Ross MacKenzie, Simon Chapman
ABSTRACT
The tobacco industry is not obligated to disclose
ingredients and additives used in manufactured tobacco
production. This paper describes global reaction to
a press release highlighting evidence that porcine
haemoglobin (“pig’s blood”) was sometimes used in
cigarette manufacturing while never being disclosed to
smokers. The case study illustrates the power of press
releases to ignite major interest in tobacco control issues.
INTRODUCTION
News media are the leading sources of public
information on health issues
1 2
and play a key role
in health policy formulation.
3
For tobacco control
advocates, media coverage of tobacco control issues
presents an unparalleled opportunity to dissemi-
nate information about the health consequences of
smoking to the public, and calls for action on
tobacco control issues by policymakers.
4
The news
industry has been dramatically altered by the
exponential growth of the internet; between 2000
and 2009, the number of global internet users
increased 5000-fold from 360 000 to more than 1.8
billion.
5
In the USA 61% of citizens now get their
news online, with the internet slightly behind
television and ahead of newspapers as a preferred
news source.
6
Health and medicine are the third
most accessed online news category, after weather
and national events.
6
The current project distributed media news
releases on unpublicised tobacco control-related
research reports from March to August 2010, with
the aim of increasing media coverage of issues of
strategic importance to tobacco control. Each release
summarised a selected report, and included
commentary by an Australian expert.
7
A pilot study
reported tobacco control news items released by the
project accounted for 20.5% of total tobacco-related
news reports over a five-week period in New South
Wales (NSW) urban print media.
8
This paper pres-
ents a case study of the extraordinary international
uptake of one news release that focused on the
possible use of pig haemoglobin in cigarette filters.
We also give examples of how the story was
distorted in some reports.
Porcine haemoglobin in cigarettes
In March 2010 we were alerted to a review of
a photography book entitled Pig 05049 by Dutch
artist Christien Meindertsma in the UK newspaper
the Guardian.
9
The book listed 185 manufactured
goods using pig components. These included
commonplace products like bacon, pork and
sausages, and less well-known uses including gela-
tine in beer; cheesecake and bullets; intestinal
material used in the anti-coagulant heparin; and
porcine haemoglobin in cigarette filters. In
researching the book, Meindertsma informed us
that she had ‘talked to the people who make, sell
and develop the ingredients derived from pigs
within the companies that are at the beginning of
the chain’(email from author).
The potential news interest of pig-sourced prod-
ucts in cigarette manufacturing was immediately
apparent, particularly for Islamic, Jewish and vege-
tarian smokers. It was equally clear that this infor-
mation provided a memorable way of illustrating
concerns that ingredients such as additives or
processing aids used in tobacco products are virtu-
ally unregulated and non-transparent.
10e12
Such
discussion could potentially stimulate governments
to consider ingredients disclosure legislation.
To assess Meindertsma’sclaim that pig’s blood
was used in cigarettes we conducted a Google
search using ‘porcine haemoglobin’and found that
it has many industrial uses. In regard to tobacco, in
January 1997 the development of a new ‘biofilter’
cigarette technology was announced by Greek
researchers, who described it as ‘revolutionary’and
stated that it would ‘make smoking less harmful
for hundreds of millions of smokers around the
world’.
13
Their system contained haemoglobin
from an unspecified source which purportedly acted
as ‘as an artificial lung’, thus protecting smokers
from ‘70%’of tar, oxygen-free radicals and nitric
oxide and its derivatives ‘without altering the taste
of the cigarette and its aromatic elements’.
13
The
announcement also referred to health benefits
related to secondhand smoke exposure, as smoke
exhaled from a cigarette with a biological filter was
reported to be ‘40 times less toxic’.
13
Similar claims for the efficacy of the biofilter
system were made in the February 1998 edition
of the tobacco industry trade journal Tobacco Reporter,
to the consternation of other cigarette manufac-
turers, which were then still uniformly denying
health risks attributable to smoking.
14
Critics argued
that these health claims had not been verified in
proper trials,
15
and subsequent studies have confirmed
that they were not only unsubstantiated,
16e18
but
created an ‘illusion that there are ways to restrict
the adverse health effects of smoking’.
18
The new biofilter technology was used in BF
brands made by the Greek cigarette company
SEKAP, and its commercial potential was confirmed
when BF captured 6% of Greek market share in the
month following its launch.
14
SEKAP’s website
School of Public Health,
University of Sydney, Australia
Correspondence to
Professor Simon Chapman,
School of Public Health,
University of Sydney, Sydney,
NSW 2006, Australia; simon.
chapman@sydney.edu.au
Accepted 1 November 2010
Published Online First
15 December 2010
Tobacco Control 2011;20:169e172. doi:10.1136/tc.2010.039776 169
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describes the launch of ‘the first biological filter world-wide’as
the peak of company’s‘evolution to date’, and responsible for
making SEKAP the second largest cigarette manufacturer in
Greece.
19
By the time the Greek government prohibited the use
of healthier smoking claims in advertising in 2002
20
‘the image
of a less harmful cigarette had already been created in
consumers’minds’,
21
and claims that the biofilter system can
‘neutralize various harmful compounds in cigarette smoke’and
provide ‘higher protection to the smoker’are still printed on the
back surface of every pack.
15
Finally, BF cigarettes are exported
to Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
The Russian cigarette manufacturer Donskoy Tabak promoted
its use of the ‘three-segments biofilter which contains activated
carbon, treated with a special mixture on the basis of haemo-
globin’in its 21 VEK brand,
22
while a filter manufacturer, Choice
Filters, also makes filters with haemoglobin,
23
which it claims
are sold in the USA and Canada.
On 30 March 2010 we distributed a media release entitled
‘New book on pig products reveals problems for Islamic, Jewish
and vegetarian smokers’
24
to Australian media. The release
included comments by author SC highlighting the ongoing
problem surrounding the confidentiality of cigarette ingredi-
ents.
24
Global media reports were tracked using Google and
Google News, and Australian coverage tracked using Media
Monitors
25
and FACTIVA,
26
as well as Google.
International coverage
The pig’s blood story generated extraordinary international
attention (table 1), and internet searches revealed that news-
papers covering the release included the UK Daily Mail online,
27
the Times of India,
28
the Jakarta Globe
29
and the Calcutta News.
30
Further indication of the impact of the release is suggested by
the fact that the first page of results generated by a typical
internet search generates nearly 90% of user traffic.
31
All results
of the first page of returns for all four search strings listed in
table 1 were related to our release.
Australian coverage
The story was picked up by just one newswire service, Austra-
lian Associated Press (AAP),
32
and subsequently appeared in 24
media-based in New South Wales (table 2). These included the
internet sites of the state’s two leading daily newspapers, but
most coverage occurred in NSW-based national media. Five
nationally broadcast television reports included two segments
aired on the US-based satirical television news programme The
Colbert Report.
33
The story also ran in 17 news outlets based in
other Australian states.
Journalistic distortions
Following the release, author SC gave one interview to Israeli
television, but was not interviewed by any other media until
a visit to Indonesia in late June when about 15 journalists
resurrected the story for local coverage. All other coverage was
precipitated by the initial media release, as reported by
the AAP.
32
The growing coverage incorporated a large number
of inaccurate claims, some of which could be described as
factoids, first described by Norman Mailer as ‘facts which have
no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper ’.
34
Meindertsma’s publication was widely reported, for instance, as
evidence that cigarettes in general incorporated pig haemoglobin
in filter construction, and author SC received many emails,
mainly from Muslims, wanting to know which brands on sale in
their country contained pig’s blood.
The gravity with which some organisations treated these
media reports is suggested by the South African National Halaal
Association, which issued a leaflet (figure 1), which was posted
on its website and distributed to mosques across the country.
The leaflet’s claims that use of pig haemoglobin, cognac and rum
in cigarette manufacture had been confirmed caused a debate
that involved retailers, cigarette manufacturers and the tobacco
control community.
35
Calls for testing of cigarettes sold locally
occurred in Indonesia,
36
Malaysia,
37
Brunei
38
and by the Refik
Saydam National Public Health Agency of Turkish Ministry of
Health.
39
In late July 2010, the story took a new turn when
Iran’s semi-official news agency Mehr quoted Mohammad Reza
Madani of the country’s Society for Fighting Smoking who
claimed that:
contraband Marlboros have been contaminated with pig
haemoglobin and unspecified nuclear material. Madani claimed
Philip Morris International, which sells Marlboro outside the U.S.,
is ‘led by Zionists’and deliberately exports tainted cigarettes.
40
A 21 August 2010 Google search using the search string ‘pig’s
blood cigarettes Iran’returned 22 700 hits.
The response of the tobacco industry to the release was
generally muted although BAT subsidiaries in Malaysia,
Australia and Hong Kong denied using porcine products.
41e43
South African companies were the most vociferous, where
denials were issued by BAT, Japan Tobacco International, Philip
Morris SA and the Tobacco Institute of South Africa.
44
DISCUSSION
Coverage of the pig haemoglobin story met the project’s objec-
tive of creating media coverage of key tobacco control policy
issues, in this case the tobacco industry’s longstanding refusal to
make full public disclosure of all ingredients contained in ciga-
rettes. The great majority of international media and other
internet attention focused on concerns raised by observers
regarding the implications of smoking cigarettes that potentially
contained ingredients that were haram, or prohibited, in Muslim
society. We suspect that few previous news episodes have drawn
greater global attention to this issue.
Table 1 Google News and Google search results MarcheMay 2010
Google News search string March April May Total
Pig haemoglobin cigarettes 3 6 3 12
Pig haemoglobin cigarette filters 5 7 3 15
Pig’s blood cigarettes 5 6 4 15
Pig’s blood cigarette filters 4 6 4 14
Total 56
Google search strings Hits (23 June 2010)
Pig haemoglobin cigarettes About 137 000
Pig haemoglobin cigarette filters About 16 500
Pig’s blood cigarettes About 149 000
Pig’s blood cigarette filters About 53 600
Table 2 New South Wales potential audience for media carrying pig
haemoglobin release*
NSW audience
(adults 18 years+)yHits by media type NSW National
Internet 14 3 11 2 802 000
Television 5 e5 278 000
Radio 4 1 3 67 000
Print 1 1 e11406
Total 24 3 158 406
Source: Media Monitors, Factiva.
*30 Marche9 April 2010.
yAudience figures not available for 2 radio reports and 6 internet reports, so total is
underestimate.
170 Tobacco Control 2011;20:169e172. doi:10.1136/tc.2010.039776
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The rapid and widespread dissemination of the pig’s blood
release demonstrates the increasingly significant role of the
internet in media advocacy for public health policy. We found
41% of all media hits were online, including the websites of
traditional print outlets such as the Sydney Morning Herald and
Daily Telegraph, which did not cover it in their hardcopy editions.
Significantly for many advocacy agencies, the cost of sending the
release out was negligible.
The remarkable level of coverage the release attracted also
suggests the potential opportunities created by framing impor-
tant tobacco control issues in unusual or unorthodox ways to
attract the attention of newsrooms staff who may ordinarily
regard tobacco control stories as predictable and ‘tired’.
While in this instance, we were only contacted by one
news programme (Israeli television) after the release, big news
stories can cause a deluge of requests for interviews. In this
instance, the deluge took the form of emails from citizens
requesting further information. Preparation of answers to
‘frequently asked questions’sheets are invaluable in efficiently
responding to such inquiries, as are brief notes to assist those
being interviewed in stressing a limited number of key points
during interviews.
Apart from its interest to Islamic and Jewish smokers, this
release was intended to highlight government dereliction of duty
to regulate tobacco and secretiveness by tobacco companies in
their general failure to disclose ingredients. As planned, all
inquiries about whether pig sourced products were being used in
cigarettes in different countries immediately came up against
the problem of the non-availability of ingredient information.
Policy reform in tobacco control rarely follows rapidly from
a single episode of publicity, but follows sustained advocacy that
typically lasts years and sometimes decades. Raising public
interest and concern about tobacco product regulation presents
many challenges, as many additives in use are chemicals with
names that hold little meaning for consumers. By widely
publicising an ingredient that would raise great concern in many
smokers, our release could have contributed to raising awareness
that tobacco products are unregulated.
Funding Cancer Institute NSW.
Competing interests None declared.
Contributors Both authors contributed to all aspects of the paper’s production.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
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doi: 10.1136/tc.2010.039776
2010 2011 20: 169-172 originally published online December 15,Tob Control
Ross MacKenzie and Simon Chapman
concealment of cigarette ingredients
news release highlighted tobacco industry
Pig's blood in cigarette filters: how a single
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