EU agencies and conflicts of interest

European Parliament reprimands food advisory body for industry links.
Three European agencies are fighting to rebut charges that they enjoy an overly cosy relationship with companies and interest groups.
Read article on the Nature science journal website

For a new perspective on conflicts of interest with regard to the pharmaceutical industry and health campaigning charities

For a new perspective on conflicts of interest with regard to the pharmaceutical industry and health campaigning charities I invite you to put the name of one such charity and the words "pharmaceutical sponsors" into your favourite search engine's searchbox. - I typed

asthma.org.uk pharmaceutical sponsors

into my searchbox and I was led to a page about a publication by The Stationery Office, viz.

The Influence of the Pharmaceutical Industry: Fourth Report of Session 2004-05

By Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Health Committee, Health Committee Parliament Great Britain House of Commons.

Whoever the actual people were who wrote this publication, they were clearly aware that the drug industry's sponsorship of charities is not motivated by philanthropy, but by greed, in the hope and expectation of increasing the sales of their drugs, and thereby increasing their profits. You may draw your own conclusions from that, as I do mine. It leads me to conclude that the advice given on the websites and in the literature of some at least of the major health campaigning charities, such as AsthmaUK, DiabetesUK, British Heart Foundation and others, may not really be in the best interests of the patients/sufferers they ostensibly serve. I hold in mind that we are constantly assured that business companies must act in the interests of their share-holders. So if I wanted to help people suffering from asthma, I personally would advise them to cut down on salt and salty food as this would improve their health in many ways. It would reduce excess fluid retention and thereby reduce excess weight, one of the risk factors for asthma, It would reduce high blood pressure if they had high blood pressure. It would reduce breathing problems. - And very importantly, if they had gained a lot of weight from using prescribed steroids for their asthma symptoms, it would speedily reduce that weight gain and the other serious adverse effects of prescribed steroids.(See my webpage about prescribed steroids.) What I would definitely not do is donate to AsthmaUK... - I don't donate to drug company profits.

Conflicts of Interest on Stilts - or is it on Steroids?

Conflicts of Interest on Stilts - or is it Steroids? - Read George Monbiot's Guardian article. "Democracy itself is being undermined by publicly funded agencies crawling with conflicts of interest and devoid of scrutiny" I urge you to read the whole of this excellent article about how undue power is increasingly being accorded to Big Pharma and other industrial giants, while ordinary voters and other taxpayers go unrepresented on these quangos.

And here is some of what Dr Rath has to say about this: "At the time of writing, the Board of Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) contains retired senior executives from drug companies AstraZeneca and Merck Sharp & Dohme. Similarly, its Executive Board contains a former employee of Glaxo, DuPont and DuPont Pharmaceuticals who is currently an employee of Bristol-Myers Squibb; a former employee of Glaxo Wellcome and GlaxoSmithKline; and a former employee of SmithKline Beecham. Continuing this pattern, the council members on the country’s Medical Research Council (MRC) include representatives of Sanofi Pasteur and Pfizer, whilst its Global Health Group and Translational Research Group both have members from GlaxoSmithKline."

Freudian Slip by the Department of Health

Freudian Slip by the Dept of Health: see the Guardian article Matthew Freud picks up £1m-a-year contract with Department of Health. The contract is intended to improve public health, e.g. reduce obesity.

Freud is a PR guy whose agency (Freud Communications) works for clients that include Pepsi, KFC, Walkers Crisps and the premium drinks company, Diageo. They are companies whose products could never be accused of being remotely good for public health. And remember Change4Life? - Freud handled that anti-obesity campaign, notable for its spectacular lack of success in reducing the nation's growing obesity problem. Well if Freud and his company have as little success at improving public health as they have so far demonstrated, at least their other clients will feel the benefit in their swelling profits. - Anyone noticed the old enemy, Conflicts of Interest, rearing its ugly head again?

Today is World Diabetes Day

Today, November 14th 2011, is World Diabetes Day. November 14th was the birthday of Sir Frederick Banting, the Nobel Laureate who, in 1922, discovered insulin. If you have diabetes, I believe you would find the following articles interesting:

Paleolithic diet much better for diabetics than conventional ‘diabetes diet’

Vitamin D has potential to combat Type 2 diabetes

Conflicts of interest rife in those setting diabetes and cholesterol guidelines

More about Conflicts of Interest within the Medical Profession

"In 1996, shortly after we began tracking the pharmaceutical industry, we spent time looking at obesity research and the latest diet pills. In doing so, we noticed that a panel that was assembled by the government to develop a guideline for the overweight known as the Body Mass Index. And it was populated by experts, nearly all of whom had a financial tie to a drugmaker selling or developing such pills. The finding, of course, was not all that new, but the practice continues, according to a new study in BMJ, which examined panels responsible for generating clinical practice guidelines on screening and/or treatment for high cholesterol or diabetes in the US and Canada between 2000 and 2010. A good many of the panelists - and panel chairs - had conflicts of interest. But not all were disclosed."
Read article at pharmalot.com
See also Dr Briffa's recent article on conflicts of interest.

Private Finance Initiative contracts: File on 4 investigation

They are not guiltless, the gulls who played their parts in setting up these PFI deals decades ago. I urge you to visit the BBC webpage about this and listen to the File on 4 programme using iPlayer. "The Treasury is failing to monitor the "excessive" profits being made by the sale of PFI equity in the so-called "secondary" market, the BBC is told." Were the guys at the Treasury too dimwitted to be trusted with taxpayers' money or were they suffering from those infamous 'conflicts of interest' that are as near as dammit to bribes? - I know what I think, and I expect it's what you think too.

The medical drug-pushers are at it again: Wald still pressing for his polypills to be routinely prescribed to over-55s

In this BBC News report Professor Sir Nicholas Wald makes the dubious claim that when assessing the risk of heart problems, offering drugs to lower cholesterol and blood pressure to all over-55s has the same results as testing for cholesterol or blood pressure problems. He also says it would be simpler and cost effective. Well it might be simpler, and it might very well be cost-effective for Wald himself (see some discussion here of possible conflict of interest, since Wald and Law own a patent on the idea of the polypill) but I strongly doubt that there would be any gain for the NHS.

Statins are drugs that lower cholesterol and Wald wants statins to be part of the polypills. Statins are extremely profitable for drug manufacturers, but they do more harm than good to most of the people who take them. - Click on the STATINS label below this post to see lots of information about this.

There is a simple, safe, cost-free, drug-free way to lower high blood pressure, improve heart health and reduce heart attacks and strokes and many other degenerative illnesses for the over-55s - or indeed for any other age. - That is for GPs and other healthcare professionals seriously to explain to patients and the general public the huge health benefits from eating less salt and salty food. An even more effective measure would be to have a Secretary of State for Health with the guts and sense and decency to push through statutory upper limits for the amount of salt/sodium permitted to be added to processed foods, and especially to bread, which is usually high in salt and yet is a large part of most people's diet. He should also ban the food industry's use of synthetic transfats as additives to biscuits, cakes etc. And he should remove the food and drink manufacturers from the Dept of Health committee that advises on what to do about obesity.

Here's another good idea: tell the truth about Saturated Fats. - You may like to spare 2min 35secs to watch the excellent little video on this page.

Conflicts of interest and the drug companies

Major philanthropic foundations, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, regularly make the news with their donations and initiatives aimed at improving global health. But there is an aspect to their efforts that may be overlooked - such organizations can have links with drugmakers that could constitute a conflict of interest, according to an analysis published in PLoS Medicine.
Read article at pharmalot.com
The Dr Rath Health Foundation comments: The PLoS analysis adds significantly to the information about the Gates Foundation that was published by the Los Angeles Times in January 2007. In particular, the researchers found that several members of the Gates Foundation’s management committee, leadership teams, affiliates, and major funders are currently or were previously members of the boards or executive branches of major drugmakers, including Merck and Novartis. To examine the commercial network of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, click here and here. For further information about Bill Gates, click here.

Unethical financial conflicts of interest dominated some panels of medics

Unethical financial conflicts of interest dominated some panels of medics who wrote guidelines on cardiovascular health in recent years. See NYTimes article.

Government Ministers and possible conflicts of interest

There is a pretence that when UK government ministers put their financial investments into a blind trust this frees them from conflicts of interest in the decisions they make as ministers. (See Guardian report and the Comments beneath the report.) People who believe this nonsense, I suspect, spend quite a lot of their time away with the fairies... No doubt they also believe those members of the medical profession who claim that their financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry in no way influence their decisions about which drugs to prescribe/recommend?

Leukaemia drug treatment research compromised by drug company funding and authors with potential conflicts of interest?

Three Australian oncologists say cancer treatment research published in one of the world's most prestigious medical journals may have been compromised by a drug company that funded the study. They said publication of the research in The Lancet might have boosted the drug's perceived value to doctors and patients around the world, helping its manufacturer, Roche, make billions of dollars from the product.
Read article in the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)