Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18596

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: Journal Article

Sheldon T
Patient groups must reveal corporate sponsorship, urges campaign group
BMJ 2010 Aug 16; 341:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/341/aug16_1/c4459

Notes:

An international pharmaceutical campaign group is urging the European Medicines Agency to tighten its rules that require patient and consumer bodies that work with the agency to disclose any corporate funding they receive. This follows the group’s research findings that two thirds of the bodies advising the agency received “partial or significant” funding from pharmaceutical manufacturers or industry associations.

At the same time, fewer than half of these bodies met the agency’s own financial reporting guidelines, the report by Health Action International Europe shows.

The campaign group investigated the funding and disclosure of 23 organisations that were eligible to work with the agency from 2006 to 2008. This showed a 70% increase in the average annual corporate funding and “low compliance” with the agency’s 2005 guidelines on financial transparency, designed to avoid any possible conflict of interest.

Fifteen organisations received between 0.2% and 99% of their annual funding from corporate . . .