CAMPCO seeks Centre’s intervention against ‘data manipulation’ to project arecanut as carcinogenic by WHO

Though original studies primarily focused on tobacco, arecanut was unjustifiably included with manipulated sample sizes and misleading titles, alleged CAMPCO president A. Kishore Kumar Kodgi.

The Central Arecanut and Cocoa Marketing and Processing Cooperative Limited (CAMPCO), Mangaluru has alleged that the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), under the World Health Organization (WHO), has manipulated data to project that arecanut is carcinogenic.

The CAMPCO is a multi-State cooperative society of Karnataka and Kerala where arecanut is widely cultivated by lakhs of farmers.

On November 25, in a letter to Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare and Chemicals and Fertilisers Jagat Prakash Nadda, the co-operative’s president A. Kishore Kumar Kodgi sought urgent action against the alleged data manipulation.

He alleged that 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.

“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.

Mr. Kodgi said, in page 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.

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 the table in the IARC Monograph, and it was changed to ‘Survey of arecanut and tobacco use and oral submucous fibrosis, Gujarat, India’.