Health

An earlier PRWatch blog exposed an unseemly partnership between the American Heart Association and Rite Aid Drug Stores after AHA teamed with Rite Aid to promote the "Go Red for Women" campaign to increase awareness of heart disease in women. AHA selected Rite Aid as its partner for "Go Red" even though Rite Aid sells cigarettes, a leading cause of heart disease. This bizarre alliance gave Rite Aid the ability to brag publicly that it was "taking a stand against heart disease in women" while simultaneously displaying "healthy heart" posters alongside cigarette displays in its stores across the country. In another unseemly alliance, it was revealed that Eugene Trani, the President of Virginia Commonwealth University, which operates a medical center, school of public health and medical school, was found to be accepting a $40,000 annual retainer, plus fees totaling $3,500 and stock options, for serving on the board of the Universal Corporation, a leading global supplier of tobacco leaf.

Voices of caution are responding to recent breathless headlines about the supposed heart-health benefits of statin drugs. Publications including Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times claimed "that millions more people could benefit from taking the cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins." As health reporter Andre Picard points out, the net health benefits from statins are actually "modest."

The headlines were based on a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. However, the study failed to impress Merrill Goozner of the Integrity in Science Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Goozner reviewed the study closely and found it interesting mostly for "what it reveals about profit-driven medical research and how it contributes to making the U.S. health care system the most bloated and wasteful in the world."

November 23, 2008 marks ten years since 46 state Attorneys General and the major American tobacco companies signed the big tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA). Besides being the largest legal settlement in history and resolving an unprecedented onslaught of litigation against the industry, the MSA required tobacco companies to pay approximately $200 billion to the states over 25 years (subject to tweaks for inflation and market share).

The devil, however, was in the details. Heralded at the time as a defeat for the tobacco industry and a victory for public health, the MSA has actually done little to change the status quo. It ended some forms of tobacco advertising, for example, but the restrictions adopted were in reality less important to the industry than to public health authorities. The industry abandoned billboards and transit ads, ads in magazines with a high youth readership, and ads within a certain distance of schools. However, it continued marketing through high levels of advertising, bar nights, event sponsorships, direct mail, and retail placements.

Cholesterol-reducing drugs called statins have been in the news lately following the release of a major medical study that found that statins can prevent heart disease and stroke in people with no previous history of heart disease.

Statins are among the biggest-selling family of drugs of all time. Many articles about the study mentioned above, including one on the credible web site WebMD, also mention the specific drug used in the study: Crestor.

The study has generated hundreds of articles, most of which repeat the same basic framing of the issue: if heart disease is the problem, a drug is the answer.