[Ip-health] Financial Times: WHO accuses drugs groups of interference

[Asia Russell]

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INTERNATIONAL ECONOMY: WHO accuses drugs groups of interference
Financial Times; Dec 18, 2001
By FRANCES WILLIAMS

A senior World Health Organisation official has
attacked growing interference by pharmaceutical
companies in the conduct of clinical trials and the
publication of their results.
Dr Jonathan Quick, director of essential drugs and
medicines policy at WHO, says the reliability of
clinical trials - essential for the development of new
drugs - is increasingly imperilled by conflicts of
interest, "inappropriate involvement" of sponsors in
trial design and management, and bias in publishing
the results.
Writing in the latest WHO bulletin, he calls for a
code of practice governing the relationship between
researchers and sponsors to safeguard scientific
independence and ensure impartial handling and
assessment of the results.
This could be along the lines of the Helsinki
declaration adopted in 1964 by the World Medical
Association, the international doctors' grouping,
which lays down rules protecting human subjects in
clinical trials.
Dr Quick says the new rules should bind sponsors and
researchers to respect the "intellectual independence"
of researchers, establish a registry for the details
of all trials, prohibit legal action by sponsors
against researchers except in the case of fraud, and
protect whistle-blowers who report unscientific and
unethical research practices.
Such a declaration is needed because "in a highly
competitive world, the pressures may be simply too
great for individual researchers, universities,
medical journals, or public agencies to stem the tide
of commercial influence", he says.
WHO's concern reflects growing evidence of commercial
manipulation of trials or their results.
Last September the editors of 13 leading medical
journals made an unprecedented joint statement saying
they would refuse to publish studies where the
researchers did not appear to have professional
independence. www.ft.com/globaleconomy
www.who.int/bulletin www.globalfundatm.org
Copyright: The Financial Times Limited 1995-1998


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