ZEPHYR was a secret code word for lung cancer invented by British American Tobacco in the UK, to be used in its internal memos. An example from a 1957 BAT memo : "As a result of several statistical surveys, the idea has arisen that there is a causal relationship between ZEPHYR and tobacco smoking, particularly cigarette smoking."
In 1952 a British scientist, Richard Doll, had published a seminal study published in the British Medical Journal that established a "real association between carcinoma of the lung and smoking". Over the following decades the evidence became stronger and Big Tobacco launched a damage-limitation exercise. Tobacco companies hired New York public relations company Hill & Knowlton to counter the negative publicity for cigarettes. One Hill & Knowlton document stated : "We have one essential job- which can be simply said: Stop public panic...there is only one problem - confidence, and how to establish it; public assurance and how to create it". Throughout the 1960s and 1970s tobacco companies "were brazen in their denials despite the mounting scientific evidence linking smoking with a range of cancers and serious respiratory illnesses." [1] One Philip Morris document written in 1976 said; "Anything can be considered harmful. Apple sauce is harmful if you get too much of it." [2]