Health

British American Tobacco (BAT) reached an out of court settlement in a case that threatened to explore the company's "document retention policy," under which sensitive documents were shredded.

"Around the country, doctors in private practice have set up tax-exempt charities into which drug companies and medical device makers are, with little fanfare, pouring donations — money that adds up to millions of dollars a year," Reed Abelson reports in the New York Times.

In contrast to the more than $15 billion in direct marketing spent in the U.S. to exhort children to buy food and non-food products, children often don’t get very far with the companies when they start asking questions. Olympia, Washington teacher Michi Thacker assigned her elementary students to write food manufacturers to raise questions, such as where the macaroni comes from.

A report by Consumers International, a global federation of consumer organisations, examined the corporate social responsibility policies of 20 major drug companies to test what information they disclose about sponsoring patient groups, funding disease awareness campaigns and offering hospitality to medical experts.