Ex-Surgeon General Testifies in Tobacco Suit
AP 2oct01

WHEELING, WV -- A former U.S. surgeon general testified Monday that cigarette makers have long been at odds with authorities trying to prevent lung cancer _ a disease he called ``the largest man-made epidemic in history.''

Dr. Julius Richmond, the nation's top public health official under President Carter from 1977 to 1981, testified in a class-action lawsuit filed by some 250,000 healthy West Virginia smokers against four tobacco companies, Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson and Lorillard.

The smokers, who have smoked a pack a day for at least five years without becoming sick, want an unprecedented medical monitoring program to detect lung diseases.

Richmond said that in 1954, tobacco companies issued a statement that ran in newspapers nationwide, pledging to help safeguard public health.

Instead, Richmond said, they withheld information about additives in cigarettes and held a pre-emptive news conference the day before he released his 1979 surgeon general's report, which focused in part on smoking and lung cancer.

The industry called the focus on smoking potentially ``dangerous and unfounded'' at the news conference, suggesting it diverted attention from other possible causes of lung cancer, such as air pollution.

``We were in the midst of the largest man-made epidemic in history, and that is lung cancer,'' Richmond testified.

Because lung cancer, emphysema and other diseases take time to develop, medical monitoring for smokers is ``reasonable,'' said Richmond, an 85-year-old professor emeritus at Harvard.

The industry contends there is no benefit to medical monitoring, and the best solution for smokers concerned about their future health is to quit.