There are two items in today's newsletters that call into the question the morality or otherwise of certain medical professionals and scientists. The first is the complicity of medical researchers in helping the tobacco companies cover up the serious health consequences of smoking for so many years. It is bad enough that the editor of Bild - himself an avid smoker - cooperated with the German tobacco companies to prevent Lufthansa from banning smoking on its domestic flights. But, the same documents that show this also show that medical scientists took tobacco company money to write scholarly articles attempting to refute the growing awareness of the link between smoking, ill health and premature death from a number of causes.
The other is the way in which our new Minister of Health is taking the initiative to rekindle spending and emphasis on the care and treatment of the many South Africans who live with HIV and AIDS. Our previous health minister was a medical doctor. Barbara Hogan is not - but she appears to have far more compassion and awareness of the magnitude of the problem and of how to tackle it.
As both an editor and a medical doctor I am always particularly concerned when lack of integrity shows itself in either profession. In these two cases lives were at stake. We are lucky that - in both cases - sense and science finally prevailed.
