Tobacco and Public Health: A Fundamental Conflict of Interest

February 5, 2018

Last week, Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald—director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—resigned from the position, after reports about her financial investments in a tobacco company that represented a serious conflict of interest. According to documents that Politico obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Fitzgerald toured CDC’s Tobacco Laboratory one day after she purchased stock in Japan Tobacco. As the federal agency tapped with leading the country’s public health efforts, the CDC spearheads programs and policies aimed at preventing smoking and tobacco-related diseases. Tobacco remains the leading preventable cause of death globally, killing more than 7 million people each year.

The organizational shift at the CDC follows an open letter from deans of 17 public health schools in the U.S. and Canada—including the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health—pledging to refuse research funding from the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, a group funded by the tobacco company Philip Morris. The deans cite a “fundamental and irreconcilable” conflict of interest between public health policy and the tobacco industry’s interests in marketing tobacco products and obstructing evidence-based tobacco control. 

To learn more about the current status of the global tobacco epidemic, explore the most recent worldwide update on tobacco use and prevention policies.