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Introduction
News media are the leading sources of public information on health issues 1 2 and play a key role in health policy formulation. 3 For tobacco control advocates, media coverage of tobacco control issues presents an unparalleled opportunity to disseminate information about the health consequences of smoking to the public, and calls for action on tobacco control issues by policymakers. 4 The news industry has been dramatically altered by the exponential growth of the internet; between 2000 and 2009, the number of global internet users increased 5000-fold from 360 000 to more than 1.8 billion. 5 In the USA 61% of citizens now get their news online, with the internet slightly behind television and ahead of newspapers as a preferred news source. 6 Health and medicine are the third most accessed online news category, after weather and national events. 6
The current project distributed media news releases on unpublicised tobacco control-related research reports from March to August 2010, with the aim of increasing media coverage of issues of strategic importance to tobacco control. Each release summarised a selected report, and included commentary by an Australian expert. 7 A pilot study reported tobacco control news items released by the project accounted for 20.5% of total tobacco-related news reports over a five-week period in New South Wales (NSW) urban print media. 8 This paper presents a case study of the extraordinary international uptake of one news release that focused on the possible use of pig haemoglobin in cigarette filters. We also give examples of how the story was distorted in some reports.
Porcine haemoglobin in cigarettes
In March 2010 we were alerted to a review of a photography book entitled Pig 05049 by Dutch artist Christien Meindertsma in the UK newspaper the Guardian . 9 The book listed 185 manufactured goods using pig components. These included commonplace products like bacon, pork and sausages, and less well-known uses including gelatine in beer; cheesecake and bullets; intestinal material used in the anti-coagulant heparin; and porcine haemoglobin in cigarette filters. In researching the book, Meindertsma informed us that she had 'talked to the people who make, sell and develop the ingredients derived from pigs within the companies that are at the beginning of the chain' (email from author).
The...