Joint Statement of the Ad-hoc Committee of the Korean Society for Preventive Medicine and the Korean Society of Epidemiology on Tobacco Lawsuits on the causal link between tobacco smoking and lung cancer

The National Health Insurance Service (NHIS) has filed a damage suit against tobacco producers KT&G, Philip Morris Korea, and BAT Korea (hereafter referred to as “Tobacco Lawsuit”). In the course of the ongoing lawsuit, heated debates are underway regarding the causal relationship between tobacco smoking and lung cancer. The affected individuals of this class action are those with one of three lung cancer types (small cell lung cancer, squamous cell lung cancer, and squamous cell laryngeal cancer), having a smoking history of 20 pack-years or more, and having smoked for 30 years or more. Given the nature of tobacco smoking as an very important risk factor threatening public health, the Korean Society for Preventive Medicine (CEO: Won-Chul Lee) and the Korean Society of Epidemiology (President: Bo Youl Choi), whose core values lie in disease prevention and health promotion, have paid particular attention to the Tobacco Lawsuit, especially to the raised debates about the causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer. Under the current circumstances, in which the plaintiff (NHIS) and the defendants (tobacco companies) repeatedly mention the value and role of epidemiologic studies in evaluating the causal connection between environmental risk factors and lung cancer in their respective briefs submitted to the court, the Korean Society for Preventive Medicine and the Korean Society of Epidemiology, whose key discipline is epidemiology, have come to have deep concerns and feel the urgent need for a position statement regarding this issue. To address this issue, the Korean Society for Preventive Medicine and the Korean Society of Epidemiology agreed to jointly constitute an “Ad-hoc Committee of Korean Society for Preventive Medicine and the Korean Society of Epidemiology on Tobacco Lawsuits” (hereafter referred to as “ad-hoc Committee”), whereupon the ad-hoc Committee was constituted with area experts (cf. the annexed list of the ad-hoc Committee members). After two seminars, continuing discussions by email, drafting a raw version of the statement with comments from ad-hoc Committee members, and coming to an agreement on the language and content, the ad-hoc Committee has drafted a joint statement. After obtaining approvals from the Korean Society for Preventive Medicine and the Korean Society of Epidemiology as well as their respective boards, the ad-hoc Committee publishes this Joint Statement on behalf of both societies.