Tobacco is the leading cause of preventable mortality globally, accounting for almost 6 million deaths annually. Professor Anna Gilmore and the Tobacco Control Research Group have undertaken extensive research on the conduct of the tobacco industry and its influence over public policies.

This has shown that the tobacco industry not only attempts to influence public health policies, but also enjoys significant influence over upstream policies, including EU regulatory reforms.

This research has significantly reduced the ability of the tobacco industry to influence public health policy. This has been achieved by contributing to the development and implementation of Article 5.3 of the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), the WHO’s first global health treaty.

These impacts involved work with beneficiaries including WHO and a variety of NGOs and by increasing awareness among policy makers of tobacco industry influence.

The importance of this work and its policy impacts has been recognised via awards from both WHO and the Public Health Advocacy Institute to Professor Gilmore.

The group has also established a novel knowledge exchange platform, a closed TobaccoTactics wiki, which enables preliminary research findings to be made publicly available faster than would occur via traditional academic outputs thereby enabling them to feed into the policy process in a more timely manner.

Impact case study

This research was submitted to the Research Excellence Framework 2014.