In October, the EU Parliament elected that pictorial warnings on cigarette packs will be mandatory throughout the EU. The images and warnings must cover 65 per cent of the front and back of the packages and this type of horror images are already available in Australia, for example. Within a number of years the images on the right, will also adorn cigarette packets sold in Sweden. The goal is to reduce smoking, and fewer young people to start smoking.
But the impact of the images actually is debated - and now research into horror pictures has led to a big brawl between researchers at the Karolinska Institute and the State Public Health Institute, FHI.
Public Health Institute refuse to pay for a study that KI been instructed to do. Researchers at KI were to make a systematic literature review, a kind of review of the current state of research, and then write a report to FHI.
Now, FHI has canceled the contract and refuse to pay the bill at over 400 000 SEK:
- We think this is exceptionally serious and strange. I've never seen anything like it, says Lucie Laflamme, dean and professor of injury epidemiology and prevention at KI.
But FHI believes it has the right:
- There is nothing strange really. We have canceled the contract with KI because we wanted a report and we did not get it. They have not delivered and then we can not pay, says Annika Fahlvik, Deputy Director General of the Public Health Institute.
Results of the study?
- That there is no scientific evidence to draw any conclusions at all about whether these pictorial warnings have no effect on smokers' behavior or on adolescents, says Professor Rosaria Galanti at the Karolinska Institute, one of the researchers behind the study.
Both KI and FHI agree on one thing: Scientists picked up a scientific paper, not a report.
But then again, opinion is divided. At Karolinska Institutet researchers argue that it agreed with FHI that they would produce an article instead of a report. They also claim that KI also offered to prepare a report - long before the mission would be completed in February 2014.
- We got an okay from the National Public Health Institute that we would make a scientific article. Then, when everything is ready, we suddenly notice that FHI are not satisfied with the product. We said, okay, then we write a report instead, which they didn't consider as a solution, says Prof. Rosaria Galanti.
You interpret this to mean that it was the content that FHI did not like - rather than the form of the report?
- Personally, I feel uneasy. Facts speaks for themselves, says Rosaria Galanti.
- It is obvious that we are concerned, for we do not see why they would turn like that says Lucie Laflamme.
In a letter to KI as Svenska Dagbladet noted the Public Health Institute are careful to point out that you do not want to be associated with the study:
SNIPH may therefore not be named in the article or in any other material relating thereto. Nor shall any writer attributed or otherwise indicated to be connected to the National Institute of Public Health, says the so-called rescission explanation.
FHI rejects, the concern of the scientists, that it was the report's findings underlying the decision not to pay for the study:
- The content of the report, I have no comments on it and I do not wish to speak about it, says Annika Fahlvik.
Comment: Again the anti-smoking brigade are proving themselves to be anti-science. See also :
The devious plan of anti-smoking campaigns to control people and stop them from using their brain