Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1536

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Hughes G, Minchin L.
Drug giants' big-money pitch exposed
The Age 2003 Dec 13
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/12/12/1071125659634.html?from=storyrhs

Full text:

Pharmaceutical companies are pouring millions into supposedly independent patient advocacy groups and the main medical organisations to help expand markets.

They are also using sponsorship and educational grants to fund disease awareness campaigns, raising concerns of “disease mongering”.

Many groups have become largely or totally reliant on pharmaceutical industry money to keep going, prompting concerns that they are increasingly open to pressure from companies pushing their products.

A special investigation by The Age has found:

A nationwide awareness campaign run by the National Asthma Council was spearheaded by a cartoon dragon that was the registered trademark of a drug company and used to promote one individual asthma medication.

A leading drug company used a public relations company to set up an expert medical board to help persuade people that they needed to be vaccinated against hepatitis A and B.

The company was not interested in raising awareness about hepatitis C through the board because it did not sell a vaccine for it.

Treatment guidelines issued to Australian doctors for some diseases are being modelled on those developed by international groups entirely funded by pharmaceutical companies selling drugs for those same conditions.

Some groups funded by pharmaceutical companies are helping lobby the Federal Government to have new drugs added to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

Groups have told The Age they know they are being indirectly used to help promote and market drugs, but say they have no option because of a lack of alternatives.

Australian Consumers Association health policy officer Martyn Goddard, a former member of the Federal Government’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee, said pharmaceutical companies had far too much influence over many consumer groups.

“Drug companies find it very easy to recruit consumer groups, and they do it very cheaply,” he said.

“There’s almost no such thing as clean money for most consumer organisations.”

The total amount of money flowing into patient groups and the main medical bodies in Australia is unclear.

The most recent figure available from the industry’s top body, Medicines Australia, shows that drug companies spent between $20 million and $25 million on philanthropic causes in 1999, which mostly covered payments to such groups.

Some groups are blocked from revealing details of the amounts they receive because of confidentiality agreements they have signed with drug companies. A briefing paper prepared for the international pharmaceutical industry by a public relations company, Hill and Knowlton, of Brussels, advised companies that they needed to consider patients as “a true target” for marketing, rather than doctors, and should build “relationships” with patient groups.

The briefing paper, prepared in December last year, detailed how the world’s second-largest drug company, GlaxoSmithKline, grew into the global leader in sales of respiratory medications by becoming the “number one partner” of patient groups and medical associations.

One medical specialist involved in an organisation totally sponsored by drug companies described the situation as like “dancing with the devil”.

There are no independent regulations covering drug company sponsorship deals and grants with patient groups in Australia.

Voluntary guidelines developed by Medicines Australia are now being independently reviewed by Swinburne University.

The review is being funded by Medicines Australia and individual drug companies.

The director of strategic relations at Medicines Australia, Steve Haynes, said the industry hoped the development of new guidelines would tackle concerns that small patient groups could be unfairly influenced by pharmaceutical companies.

But he denied that funding patient groups to run disease awareness campaigns was “disease mongering”.

“All you are trying to do with disease awareness is to get people to visit their doctor,” he said.

A South Australian general practitioner, Peter Mansfield, who runs the internationally renowned Healthy Skepticism website exposing pharmaceutical marketing techniques, said the hijacking of patient groups had become “a huge problem”.

“To be an advocate for people with those conditions, those organisations ought to be free to criticise the drug companies, just as they ought to be free to criticise doctors if we are not doing our jobs properly,” he said.

Trish Berger, the executive director of the Australian Herpes Management Forum, which relies totally on money from companies manufacturing herpes medications, believes the “vast majority” of patient groups in Australia are heavily or entirely dependent on drug company money.

Kristine Whorlow, the chief executive of the National Asthma Council, which used a drug company’s cartoon dragon to spearhead a national awareness campaign, said most sponsors now wanted a financial return on their money in the form of increased market share.

But the chairman of the Australian Medical Association’s federal therapeutics committee, Robyn Napier, said pharmaceutical companies’ sponsorship of consumer groups was not a problem, as long as specific drugs were not promoted.

“We can always pull one or two mistakes out and wave them in front of people, but in general terms I think the funding of public campaigns and educational activities by pharmaceutical companies, and that includes research, has been an incredible bonus to the community,” she said.