Pascal Diethelm

President

OxySuisse

Biography

Pascal Diethelm spent most of his professional career working at the World Health, in biomedical computing and as chief of information technology. Since his retirement, he has taken an active role in tobacco control, both at the national level and internationally. WikiLeaks and Wikipedia list him as a tobacco whistleblower. In 2001, he revealed, with Dr. Jean-Charles Rielle, that a renowned professor who led the departments of environmental health at the University of Geneva had been secretly working for Philip Morris for 30 years and conducted fraudulent studies denying the toxicity of secondhand smoke, revelation which was confirmed by the Swiss courts after a long trial in a now famous libel case known as the “Rylander affair”. More recently, Pascal Diethelm exposed the University of Zürich for accepting money from Philip Morris to produce flawed studies denying the effectiveness of the introduction of plain cigarette packaging in Australia. Pascal Diethelm has also studied, together with prof. Martin Mckee, the phenomenon of denialism.

Pascal Diethelm is president of OxySuisse, a Swiss NGO dedicated to tobacco control. He is vice-president of the Comité National Contre le Tabagisme (CNCT), a French tobacco control NGO, associate secretary general of ACT-Alliance contre le tabac (France) and board member of CIPRET-Genève, the Geneva Centre for Information on Smoking Prevention. He is a founding member of the Framework Convention Alliance (FCA). In 2013 he was a recipient of WHO’s WNTD Award. In January 2016, he was named Reviewer of the year by Tobacco Control, a journal of the BMJ Group. In an article dedicated to him, The Lancet described Pascal Diethelm as a “tireless opponent of the tobacco industry.”