More than 270 New Zealand healthcare professionals on Monday called for the government to recognize that provisions in the proposed 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) were a threat to public health. In a signed letter in the Dominion Post newspaper, the group warned that investor-state dispute settlement clauses in leaked texts of the TPP draft could enable foreign corporations to sue the government for billions of dollars if laws were passed that could affect corporate values or profits. The result would deaden government initiatives to improve health and safety, said the group under the banner of the New Zealand Health and Climate Council. "We all know smoking is dangerous, yet cigarette companies have used trade and investment agreements in other countries to aggressively defend their profits with expensive law suits over plain packaging laws," Professor Alistair Woodward, of the School of Population Health, University of Auckland, said in a statement from the council. The World Health Organization had warned about the major risks of antibiotic resistance worldwide and said that countries must take action, but the TPP agreement could subject governments to legal action if there is a loss of foreign investor profits, he said. Regulating fossil fuels to reduce climate change, a major threat to global health, would be very difficult, and the TPP could cripple the government's pharmaceutical procurement agency, PHARMAC, in buying cheap generic drugs for the public, said signatories. Signatures for the open letter had flooded in over just a few days, coinciding with the latest meeting of TPP negotiators in Vietnam from May 12 to 15, followed by a meeting of ministers in Singapore on May 19 and 20, said the statement. The TPP -- a proposed trade agreement among New Zealand, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Peru, Mexico, Malaysia, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam -- has come under growing criticism in New Zealand for the secrecy surrounding the negotiations.