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BMJ No 7114 Volume 315 News Saturday 18 October 1997
US flight attendants win settlement over passive smokingSee Editorial p 961, Paper p 973, Paper p 980In a landmark trial on second hand smoke 60,000 flight attendants have wrested a historic settlement from five major tobacco companies. The flight attendants had filed a class action suit charging that they had suffered smoking related illnesses from being subjected to high concentrations of environmental smoke and seeking $5bn (£8bn) in damages. The companies on trial were Philip Morris, R J Reynolds, Brown and Williamson, the Liggett Group, and the Lorillard Group. Also named in the suit were two lobbying groups funded by the tobacco industry - the Tobacco Institute and the Council for Tobacco Research. Under the terms of the settlement, the tobacco industry agreed to establish a $300m research institute for the study, prevention, and treatment of tobacco related illnesses. The research institute will be named after Norma Broin, a non-smoking flight attendant who contracted lung cancer and initiated the suit against the tobacco companies. Under the agreement, the individual plaintiffs received no money and the tobacco industry made no admission of guilt. The attendants are now free to seek individual damages, however, and the terms of the settlement may make it easier for them to win such suits. The burden of proof has been shifted from the plaintiffs to the defendants, so it is now up to the tobacco companies to disprove that an illness was caused by passive smoking rather than the plaintiff having to prove that it was. Also, the cigarette manufacturers agreed to waive the statute of limitations requiring that an affected person sue within four years of discovering an illness, thus allowing many more people to claim damages. In a statement the tobacco industry said: "The agreement was a common sense approach to resolving the class action aspects of the suit in a way which is consistent with the much broader legislation resolution now pending in Congress." The statement referred to the $368.5bn proposed national settlement pending congressional and presidential approval (28 June, p 1849). The tobacco industry is expected to try to shield itself from further lawsuits under the terms of the national settlement. However, Lawrence Gostin, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, said: "This might well open the door to a lot of other lawsuits by other workers who are cooped up - those in factories, restaurants, theatres, and casinos - who have consumed a steady diet of second hand smoke." The plaintiffs' case was strengthened by the testimony of numerous medical experts, including two former surgeon generals, who detailed the deleterious effects of passive smoke. Deborah Josefson,
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