Bitter taste left by sugar industry's attack on the WHO

Few readers will have been surprised at the vehement opposition from part of the food industry to the World Health Organisation's proposed new guidelines on healthy eating (Sugar industry threatens to scupper WHO, April 21). What is shocking about the attack is the timing. The world is facing the threat of a completely new infectious disease, caused by a previously unknown virus, which has already been transported outside its continent of origin. The WHO is performing a crucial role in coordinating the world's medical and scientific efforts to understand, contain and control this new disease.

This effort has been astonishingly successful; through the cooperation of many laboratories, the causative virus has been definitively identi fied, its genome completely sequenced and laboratory tests developed. All this information is publically available and all within a few weeks of recognition of this new disease. The WHO deserves our thanks and our support, rather than attacks on its funding from an industry that not only puts its profits ahead of the health of its customers, but which seems indifferent to damaging our capacity to respond to potentially catastrophic global health threats.
Christopher Clegg
Salisbury
clegg@medscape.com

· The sugar industry takes a page from the tobacco industry in its bullying tactics to suppress full, accurate and vital information to consumers to protect its bottom line. Not surprisingly, we see Kraft Foods, a tobacco subsidiary, involved. Too bad the World Sugar Organisation hasn't learned tobacco's lessons on liability for when obese diabetics around the world start suing. So far, the tobacco industry's most successful line of defence has been that people were warned about the health hazards. (Its Achilles' heel has been its failure to warn of how addictive it is.)
Sera Kirk
Vancouver, Canada

· Ironically the disinformation campaign is led by the "fatness industry" in the country with the world's greatest obesity problems. At least I can cut my own direct sugar usage and, helped by improved food labelling, avoid processed food and drink with high sugar content. As ever, it is the ignorant and poor who will suffer from the sugar industry's rapacity.
Michael Miller
Sheffield

· The US sugar industry does not want a drop in its sales. The WHO wants everybody to eat less sugar for a healthier diet. The US also has an insatiable thirst for fuel - we have just had a war in Iraq, in part, to secure fossil fuels. The answer seems simple. Convert the sugar into fuel, by methods already being used in other parts of the world. Fossil fuels will then last longer; the US diet will improve; the sugar industry will stay in full production. Everybody should be happy.
Ewen Wannop
Box, Wilts