Reflections on a half-century of Polish-U.S. cooperation on health and tobacco control

In my brief contribution, I want to discuss the power of international alliances in promoting research and good health. I would address this issue in the context of tobacco control and, specifically, using Poland as a prime example of the value of international alliances. The story may be eye-opening for those of you who are under 40 years old or so, and promote “Oh, I remember that!” for those of you who are over 40.
I first came to Poland in the Autumn of 1990. It was a time of great change – the communist system had recently fallen apart and democracy was on the doorstep, the countries to the East of Poland, which had been under Soviet domination for generations, were now free, and even the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, including Poland, did not have the spectre of the Soviet Union hovering over their daily lives.
And yet, at that time, Poland – perhaps in spite of the dizzying events that began in the late 1980s, or perhaps because of them – was a nation of contradictions. There was rampant anxiety about an uncertain future, and there was immense optimism about the potential for Poland taking its rightful place on the world stage. There was hope that a society that had been dominated by a system of government that did little to promote individual freedom could now express itself, and there was concern that freedom itself was so fragile that it could again be taken away.
I came to that Poland of contradictions at the invitation of Dr. Witold Zatoński, then of the Marie Skłodow­ska-Curie Cancer Centre in Warsaw. Witold and I had met a couple of years before, when he came through Washington, DC and came to the National Cancer Institute, and I think, right away, we saw the potential for alliances between our two countries. There was already an agreement in place between our two organisations, and we then involved Dr. Federico Welsch, who was the Director of International Affairs at the National Cancer Institute, and he also saw the potential for an alliance. Witold invited Federico and I to participate in the first of what became a series of ground-breaking conferences devoted to improving the health of the Polish people, as well as the newly freed countries of the former Soviet Union. Our focus was to be on alleviating the health burden of cigarette smoking which, in 1990, was the largest preventable cause of premature death in Poland and the former Soviet republics.
The task before us was formidable – over 40% of...


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