smokey funds
There’s an uproar. Apparently, 80% of lung cancer deaths could get caught by CT scans. While some (read: me) are rejoicing and wondering how in the hell it took so long to come up with this, others (read: the government and some people who actually do make a living off of cancer and its related realm) are freaking out. [Note: What did they do before? Just wait for someone to cough up a bunch of blood and a chunk of lung? How did we not think to give these patients CT scans?? Sorry for the digression.] These ‘others’ decided to dig into the funding behind the studies and guess what they found? That a tobacco company put up some money for it. Yup, A. Tobacco. Company. One that makes cigarettes. That you smoke. That (I guess) give you cancer. But no one really knew they had put up cash, and the tab. co. had no influence on what went down in the lab.
I’ll admit — there could be conflicts of interest there. And I’m happy to be the first, or loudest, to yell “integrity” at a situation. But this tab. co. had already stepped away from their industry’s line — they admit cigs get you hooked and are bad for you. They apparently have no problem letting people know that they are aware of how they make their money.
So, this tab. co., who makes the most money off of us smoking, helped find out a way to keep more people from dying. And because of that, the study’s under fire. Now guess who gets to step in? The gub’mint. Yup, the feds are going to do a study to … (wait for it) … see if CT scans can detect problems early enough to thwart lung cancer deaths.
Ahhh, American Goverment. Have fun with that.
