Mangaluru

The Central Arecanut and Cocoa Marketing and Processing Cooperative (Campco) Ltd has appealed to the Government seeking urgent action against the alleged data manipulation by the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

In a letter to the Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare, JP Nadda, Campco President A Kishore Kumar Kodgi, said WHO-IARC misrepresented research findings to wrongly implicate arecanut as carcinogenic. Though original studies primarily focused on tobacco, arecanut was unjustifiably included with manipulated sample sizes and misleading titles, he said.

“There seems to be a manipulation of data, as the original study reportedly involved around 1,000 samples, whereas the WHO-IARC report inexplicably cited over 11,000 samples,” he said.

Explaining this, Kodgi said in page no 126 of the ‘IARC Monographs on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans’ (Vol 85 published in 2004), there is a table no. 53 wherein the work of Gupta et al., 1998 was cited.

Changes in table

In the original paper of Gupta et al published in the National Medical Journal of India in 1998, the title of the table is ‘Prevalence of tobacco use among subjects with oral submucous fibrosis (OSF)’. However, arecanut is added in the title of table in the IARC Monograph, and it was changed as ‘Survey of arecanut and tobacco use and oral submucous fibrosis, Gujarat, India’.

Further, in the original table (Gupta et al 1998)., the sample size in arecanut use was 1,786 and total sample size was 5,018. But in the table given in the IARC Monograph, the sample sizes were manipulated as 11,786 and 15,018, respectively, he said.

Stating that these findings create doubts on the authenticity of such reports, he said this manipulation has caused significant distress among the farming community and has led to erroneous conclusions about arecanut’s safety. These distortions have severely impacted the livelihoods of lakhs of arecanut farmers who depend on the crop for sustenance, he said.

“On behalf of India’s arecanut farmers, we want to say that there have been efforts to show arecanut in bad light through such manipulation of research data. Since arecanut is the lifeline of lakhs of farmers in the arecanut-growing regions of the country, such ‘manipulated data’ create apprehension on the crop itself impacting their livelihood. Many people, who are unaware of such manipulations, tend to believe the data mentioned by WHO-IARC as true facts. We earnestly request your intervention to protect the arecanut farmers from such propaganda of international bodies through manipulated data,” he said in the letter to the Union Health Minister.

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