education

The cover of the upcoming issue of the New Yorker magazine bears a satirical cartoon that incorporates practically every jab the right wing has taken at Barack Obama and his wife Michelle: the couple is pictured standing in the White House Oval Office dressed in Muslim garb. Barack is wearing a turban, Michelle has an "Angela Davis"-type afro hairdo and is shown toting a machine gun. An American flag burns in the fireplace as the couple engages in a "terrorist fist-bump." A portrait of Osama bin Laden hangs over the fireplace. The cover is titled, "The Politics of Fear." Both presidential campaigns quickly condemned the lampooning cover as "tasteless and offensive." Jeffrey Goldberg, a blogger at the Atlantic.com laments the whole situation as "the death of humor."

Most American cigarette makers, including Philip Morris (PM), have used ammonia in their manufacturing processes for decades, to "puff up" tobacco to increase its volume, highlight certain flavors, help hold together reconstituted tobacco sheet and reduce the amount of nicotine. Lesser known is that tobacco companies use ammonia to "freebase" the nicotine in smoke, essentially turning it into "crack nicotine." Freebase nicotine is absorbed by the body more quickly and easily, resulting in a faster, harder "kick" after lighting up. Using ammonia has allowed tobacco companies to lower the tar and nicotine levels in cigarettes while still keeping smokers addicted, a strategy developed to deal with the health fears surrounding cigarettes. PM was the first to use "ammonia technology," applying it to Marlboros in the 1960s. After the change, Marlboro zoomed from a minor brand to a runaway market success, causing other cigarette makers to scramble to discover PM's "secret." After PM was accused of intentionally manipulating the nicotine deliveries of its cigarettes, the company pointed to all the other uses for ammonia to defend itself against the charge.

The American Medical Students' Association (AMSA) graded 150 medical schools on their conflict-of-interest policies and the influence that drug companies have with faculty and students. Only seven of the schools surveyed received an "A"; 60 got a failing grade, for not having sufficient policies or for not participating in the survey. AMSA president Dr. Brian Hurley called strong conflict-of-interest policies "incredibly important to protect the educational experience." Dr. Sidney Wolfe, the head of Public Citizen's health research group, said that even strong policies "would be relatively meaningless without this critical surveillance system" developed by AMSA. "Most of the medical school bureaucracies are getting too much money and other forms of largess from the drug industry to initiate these healthy, long overdue policies on their own."

On June 7, the anti-abortion groups American Life League (ALL) and Pharmacists for Life launched a new national campaign called "Protest the Pill Day 08: The Pill Kills Babies." Their goal is to convince American women to stop using oral contraceptives, which they believe kill people. June 7 marks the anniversary of the landmark 1965 Supreme Court ruling Griswold v. Connecticut, which made it legal for married couples to use contraceptives. The shift to opposing contraceptives significantly broadens the agenda of anti-abortion groups. ALL also opposes use of intrauterine devices, emergency contraception and health insurance coverage of contraceptives. The group plans to organize protests in 18 states.

Recently while browsing the Web I came across UrbanDictionary.com, which is sort of a wiki of contemporary slang. I found some of the newer words listed there amusing, like "hobosexual" (the opposite of metrosexual; someone who cares little about their looks), "consumerican," ("a particularly American brand of consumerism"), and "wikidemia" ("an academic work passed off as scholarly yet researched entirely on Wikipedia").

Then I came across a word that put me into a more thoughtful zone: "slacktivism."

"Slacktivism" (alternative spelling "slactivism") is a fusion of the words "slacker" and "activism," and UrbanDicationary.com defines it as "the act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem." It refers to ersatz acts that people perform that they have somehow come to believe are full of meaning, like slapping a magnetic ribbon on your car to "support the troops," wearing a colored rubber wristband to "fight cancer," or refusing to buy gasoline on a certain day to protest high gas prices, instead of, say, actually changing your lifestyle to use less gas.

After the New York Times revealed a secret research contract between Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and Philip Morris earlier this month, Style Weekly, a Richmond, Virginia newspaper, investigated VCU President Eugene Trani's personal financial ties to the tobacco industry and concluded that "Trani is the tobacco industry." Style found that Trani receives an annual retainer of $40,000, including stock options, plus fees totaling $3,500 per year for serving on the board of directors of the Universal Corporation, a leading global supplier of tobacco leaf. University spokeswoman Pam Lepley said she didn't "see any connection" between Trani's getting paychecks from both the Universal Corporation and a university that operates a medical school and school of public health. Lepley added that Trani's being on the board of Universal Corporation "doesn't really pertain to the university."

When a patient checks into a hospital or goes to see a doctor, they are typically handed a booklet called "Notice of Privacy Practices" and are asked to sign a document acknowledging that they received the information. Patients assume that these "privacy practices" are in place to protect their personal information and that doctors and hospitals will keep their information in strictest confidence. In reality, patients usually overlook fine print contained in these documents that say that hospitals can share their personal information and use it for fundraising purposes. Thus someone who checks into the hospital for a heart ailment can later be solicited to help pay for expensive new hospital equipment or a new diagnostic wing. Fundraising professionals call this "high touch direct mail," but others think gathering marketing information this way is disrespectful to patients. Dr. Steven Fugaro, an internist and president of the San Francisco Medical Society, says the practice raises ethical concerns. "When you go to Macy's or Wal-Mart or buy a car, it has come to be expected that your name will be used for commercial purposes. But ... people come to us because they are sick. They have an expectation that their names will be kept private, even the fact that they were treated by the doctor or a hospital." Most patients are unaware that health care privacy laws are being used to harvest marketing data.

As CMD previously reported, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) operates a School of Medicine and a School of Public Health while enjoying a cozy relationship with the tobacco industry, especially cigarette maker Philip Morris (PM). Now the New York Times reports that in 2006, VCU entered into a secret and extraordinarily restrictive research contract with PM that bars researchers from publishing, or even talking about, study results without first getting approval from PM. If news organizations ask about the contract, university officials are supposed to decline to comment and tell PM about the inquiry. All patents and other intellectual property created under the contract go to PM. The contract violates VCU guidelines for industry-sponsored research, which state "University faculty and students must be free to publish their results." David Rosner, a professor of public health and history at Columbia University in New York, says VCU's contract is "counter to the entire purpose and rationale of a university." VCU President Eugene Trani, who refused to be interviewed for the Times article, owns 6,250 shares of common stock in the Universal Leaf Corporation and sits on their Board of Directors.

Writing for AdWeek, Andrew Adam Newman reports that a deceptive PR campaign on behalf of the Coach bag company has become "the latest illustration of how a buzz-seeking stunt may backfire." Led by Paul Werth Associates, an Ohio PR firm, the "International AntiCounterfeiting Campaign" (IACC) sought to discourage people from buying knockoff handbags. As part of the campaign, Coach persuaded Hunter College in New York to offer a public relations class which invented a fictional student named "Heidi Cee." They created blog postings, a YouTube video and MySpace pages in which Heidi Cee complained that she had been ripped off when she bought a fake Coach handbag. The campaign also claimed that counterfeit products are linked to criminal activity, child labor and terrorism. The revelation that Heidi Cee was a counterfeit herself has drawn criticism, and college officials and Coach are now trying to distance themselves from the fakery. These denials drew scoffs from Sarah El-Edlibi, one of the students who participated in the class. According to El-Edlibi, "the entire PR team from Coach was in the class" egging the students on. "We were supposed to be working for Coach, who was the client, and they really liked the idea of making someone fake. If they had some ethical issues with it, they should have said so. If there was anybody who could have stopped it, it would have been Coach."

Who could blame them if they sent the Mounties to the border? CMD reported previously on the Heartland Institute's climate change skepticism, and its efforts to cast doubt on the overwhelming evidence of global warming. The Chicago-based, ExxonMobil-funded think tank has taken its case north of the border, sending out "more than 11,000 brochures and DVDs to Canadian schools urging them to teach their students that scientists are exaggerating how human activity is the driving force behind global warming." While Heartland says that the outreach effort is an attempt to introduce "balance" into the discussion, the Sierra Club of Canada disagrees. Spokesperson Emilie Moorhouse said, "It's alarming that an American think tank is distributing misinformation on the most important issue of our time in Canadian schools, to actually create an illusion that there is a scientific debate." Ignoring the consensus reached by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that climate change is "unequivocal" and caused by human activities, "the brochure and DVD said that scientists were 'deeply divided' about 'the notion that climate change is mostly the result of human activities.'" Heartland also sent the information packets to 200 Canadian policymakers.