London - Tobacco manufacturers could have produced safer cigarettes that would have reduced the health risks of smoking and prevented thousands of deaths, researchers said yesterday.
A new report from the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and Action on Smoking and Health showed the international tobacco industry had 57 US patents approved for modifications that could have reduced the chemicals in cigarettes that cause cancer, heart disease and emphysema.
But the tobacco companies never made them because producing better cigarettes would have been expensive and an admission that existing ones were "unsafe".
