Australian academic calls out Bill Gates
- — 26 August, 2010 10:33
An Australian academic and anti-tobacco campaigner has called out Bill Gates for his "plainly inconsistent" philanthropic partnership with another of the world's richest men, who has links to a tobacco company.
Writing in the influential medical journal The Lancet, Professor Simon Chapman points to Gates' move in April to cancel a grant awarded to a Canada-based research group on discovery of its link to Imperial Tobacco Canada.
Prof Chapman said the Microsoft founder should similarly rethink his involvement in the "Latam health project", a partnership announced in June in which Gates and Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim will each provide $US50 million ($56.8 million) for child health initiatives.
"Gates' decision just two months later to partner with Slim is plainly inconsistent," said Prof Chapman, from the University of Sydney's School of Public Health.
"He might well not have known about Slim's tobacco connections when he joined with him in the Latam project. He must know now.
"His subsequent actions with the IDRC (Canada's International Development Research Centre) were an outstanding example of principled philanthropy - Let's hope he makes the same call again."
Slim's extensive business interests included the majority ownership of Mexican tobacco company Cigatam, which since 2007 has been 80 per cent owned by Phillip Morris International.
Prof Chapman said it was not widely publicised, but Slim remained a non-executive director with Phillip Morris - the world's largest tobacco company.
He said Slim was also a significant philanthropist in South America, giving a reputed $2.5 billion a year, but his "net contribution" to global health could not be ignored.
"This is an industry whose products kill over 5.5 million people each year," Prof Chapman said of the "ethical bottom-feeder" tobacco industry.
"This is an industry whose product is responsible for the inexorable rise of lung cancer, the world's leading cause of cancer death and disease that was very uncommon before the mass production and marketing of cigarettes.
"Slim's massive contributions to Latin American health undoubtedly do much good, but the consequences of his continuing ... involvement in the tobacco industry are hardly trivial in any assessment of his public health footprint."
Prof Chapman said Gates' contribution to global philanthropy was "unmatched this century" and this had saved countless lives in impoverished regions though combating disease, improved health services and - more recently - by funding tobacco control measures.
Canada's IDRC was stripped of a $5.2 million research grant after it emerged chairwoman Barbara McDougall was a very recent board member of Imperial Tobacco Canada.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation said it was "terminating our tobacco control grant to the IDRC, effectively immediately".
"We are deeply disappointed by this revelation and feel this conflict is unacceptable as we work to support meaningful tobacco control programs in Africa," according to the statement.
