Analyses of thousands of whistle-blower documents and court records by the University of Bath’s Tobacco Control Research Group (TCRG) featured in Monday night’s (13 September 2021) BBC 1 Panorama documentary, ‘Dirty Secrets of the Cigarette Business’.
Filmed on location in South Africa, the documentary raised concerns about the activities of a blue-chip British company and is based on an 18-month investigation by TCRG, the BBC and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
In addition, two new reports based on Bath’s research are published (Tuesday 14 September 2021) by STOP – a global tobacco industry watchdog in which Bath TCRG is the research partner.
The two reports – Buying Influence and Advantage in Africa: An Analysis of British American Tobacco’s Questionable Payments and British American Tobacco in South Africa: Any Means Necessary – are available here. A research paper that underlies the first of these reports is published on the University of California San Francisco’s e-scholarship website. The research was led by Andy Rowell and Professor Anna Gilmore in TCRG.
For over a decade, TCRG’s prolific research on the tobacco industry has had real impact on tobacco control policies in the UK and internationally, including on important public health measures such as standardised packaging for cigarettes.
In 2018, it was announced as a partner in STOP and earlier in 2021 TCRG’s work was recognised by the World Health Organization when it received a special recognition award on World No Tobacco Day.
Find out more about TCRG here and visit its go-to source of information about the tobacco industry, Tobacco Tactics here.