Ruth Malone
Ruth E. Malone, RN, PhD, a professor of nursing and health policy in the UCSF School of Nursing's Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences, is one of three individuals honored for their use of tobacco industry documents to educate the public about tactics that tobacco companies have employed to attract and addict smokers to tobacco products.
Malone, a member of the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center, and her team at UCSF use the information as a powerful tool to reach underserved communities that have been targeted by the tobacco industry, including African Americans, gays and lesbians, and the severely mentally ill and homeless populations. Their innovative work with the documents has been widely used by public health advocates and published in American Journal of Public Health, Tobacco Control, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Academic Medicine, Nicotine & Tobacco Research, Social Science & Medicine, and other major professional journals.
"There are some who see research using these documents as mere historical exercise," Malone said. "But they give us a window into the way this industry operates that we have never had before. The public still is not aware of the full extent of the tobacco industry's corporate misconduct. Once people see the industry's record with their own eyes, they want to do the right thing."
Malone's programs continue to make a real impact on a local level. Malone - a registered nurse - co-founded a nursing group,
the Nightingales that uses the documents to educate other health professionals and the public about the tobacco industry's role in the deaths of millions of Americans and to advocate for an end to all tobacco promotion.
Malone was honored in Washington, DC, as part of the 13th World Conference on Tobacco or Health. The prestigious Tobacco Industry Documents Awards recognize individuals who use these documents for research, litigation and public educational purposes. As a result of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) between the attorneys general from 46 states, five US territories and the tobacco industry, the industry was compelled to post millions of its previously secret internal documents on the Internet.
"The foundation applauds the efforts of these individuals, who are using once-secret information from the tobacco industry to educate Americans - in Big Tobacco's own words," foundation President and CEO Cheryl Healton, DrPH, said. "By reviewing these documents alongside current science, we can clearly show that smoking is not about adult choice. It is about addiction to a product that most smokers began using when they were just youth."
In related news, the UCSF Library announced the latest addition to the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL). LTDL currently holds more than 7 million tobacco industry documents and recently has added more than 5,000 tobacco industry video and audio tapes through the new
Multimedia Collection.
The American Legacy Foundation is dedicated to building a world where young people reject tobacco and anyone can quit.
Links:
American Legacy Foundation
