A group of anti-smoking researchers claimed that a leading tobacco company attempted to divert public attention in China from the dangers of passive smoking, hoping to re-focus the nation's health policy.

Monique Muggli, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, the United States, and her colleagues published a research article based on her findings from documents from the British American Tobacco (BAT).

The papers, held in depositories in Minnesota and Guildford, United Kingdom, were made public in response to litigation against the BAT.

The research was published in the latest issue of the online academic publication the Public Library of Science (PLoS) Medicine.

The Ministry of Health estimated in 2007 that 540 million Chinese were exposed to secondhand smoke, resulting in over 100,000 deaths annually.

"As highly regulated markets continue to result in decreasing profits for transnational tobacco companies, they will look to less regulated markets in low- to middle-income countries," Dr Kelley Lee at the London-based Center on Global Change and Health, a co-author of the thesis, told Xinhua.

"Other research has demonstrated that the industry has supported a wide range of charitable activities with the purpose of furthering its own interests," Dr Lee said.

The BAT was found to have provided funding to a Beijing-based charitable foundation to distract attention from smoking to non-tobacco-induced liver diseases, among which hepatitis is a major concern in China.

The article claimed that additional strategies were launched by the BAT aimed at weakening secondhand smoke policies in China.

For example, similar to what the company had done in the United Kingdom, the BAT sought to promote air filtration technology for entertainment venues and lobbied for separate seating for smokers and non-smokers.

The BAT China declined to comment, referring Xinhua to the firm's London headquarters. However, Xinhua's e-mail has received no reply.

Longtime anti-smoking activist Gregory Yingnien Tsang said such an attention-shifting ploy was part of a "long-running tactic" used by the tobacco industry in Western countries and in emerging economies.

The 76-year-old American Chinese has been advocating smoking controls in public areas in China for 17 years.

One of the biggest misunderstandings in Tsang's eyes is that taxation from the tobacco industry is an important source of government income.

Tsang said that statistics supported the assumption that the gains from tobacco taxation were far less than what China lost in terms of deaths and medical expenses.

(Xinhua News Agency January 3, 2009)