AUSTRIA: MINISTRY AND INDUSTRY USE SAME SMOKE-FREE DATA

Austria has long languished in a sort of fantasy never-never land, where health ministers say the right thing, more or less, but don't get round to doing it, unless they want to be sacked. Persistent rumours of the government and some of its advisors being closer to the tobacco industry than to independent health experts once again seemed suspiciously near the mark earlier this year during a period of national debate about smoking in the workplace.

In January, during a discussion on the economic effects of smoke-free legislation involving individuals and organisations representing differing interest groups, a lawyer representing restaurant and café proprietors' ”rights„, Dr Manfred Ainedter, claimed that in Scotland and Ireland, which both have total bans, 1,000 venues had been forced to close, resulting in a loss of 7,600 jobs. This came as a surprise to many present, being so different from what had previously been reported from health sources in those countries. But the figures did seem to ring a bell. They turned out to have been taken directly from a fax bearing the header of the press office of the federal ministry of health. Nothing wrong with that in itself—understandable, even—except that they were familiar to Austrian health advocates from a different source: the website of British American Tobacco (BAT).

The question then arose: who supplied the statistics to whom? Was the ministry getting its data from BAT, or had BAT seized on what appeared to be some nuggets of gold, albeit in a seam as yet unknown to the public health community, mined by the ministry? The Austrian Council on Smoking and Health and other health advocates informed contacts in the press about the coincidence, …