Submitted by Bob Burton on
"Around the country, doctors in private practice have set up tax-exempt charities into which drug companies and medical device makers are, with little fanfare, pouring donations — money that adds up to millions of dollars a year," Reed Abelson reports in the New York Times.
Submitted by Judith Siers-Poisson on
Submitted by Jonathan Rosenblum on
In contrast to the more than $15 billion in direct marketing spent in the U.S. to exhort children to buy food and non-food products, children often don’t get very far with the companies when they start asking questions. Olympia, Washington teacher Michi Thacker assigned her elementary students to write food manufacturers to raise questions, such as where the macaroni comes from.
Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
By year's end, the European Union is expected to adopt REACH, a proposal that would "require manufacturers to test industrial chemicals used in the manufacturing process to gather health and safety data." REACH stands for "Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals." The bill "has prompted a U.S.-led coalition of 13 countries to step up lobbying efforts to make the final measure more amenable to industry," reports the Wall Street Journal.
Submitted by Bob Burton on
A report by Consumers International, a global federation of consumer organisations, examined the corporate social responsibility policies of 20 major drug companies to test what information they disclose about sponsoring patient groups, funding disease awareness campaigns and offering hospitality to medical experts.
Submitted by Bob Burton on
The Canadian government has until the end of June to respond to a legal action by CanWest MediaWorks, which wants to overturn the ban on direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs. CanWest MediaWorks, which owns a national television network in Canada, lodged the claim in December 2005.
Submitted by Bob Burton on
Ray Moynihan reports in the British Medical Journal that the drug companies Roche and Abbott Laboratories provide approximately two-thirds of the funding of the International Obesity Task Force (IOTF), which has over £1m in cash reserves. Roche makes the anti-obesity drug Xenical while Abbott Laboratories makes Reductil. Dr.
The small scientific world of prion researchers -- the scientists who investigate "transmissible spongiform encephalopathies" (TSE) such as mad cow disease in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) in humans -- is abuzz. That's because the two confirmed cases of US mad cow disease in Texas and Alabama are an "atypical" strain different from the British strain but identical to an atypical strain found so far in a small number of cattle in France, Germany, Poland and Sweden. The discovery of "atypical" mad cow disease in the US should not be surprising. Sheldon Rampton and I reported way back in 1997 that very strong evidence of an "atypical" TSE disease infecting US cattle was established by the work of Dr. Richard Marsh, the researcher to whom we dedicated our book Mad Cow USA.
Submitted by Bob Burton on
Pfizer has hired Clark & Weinstock, a New York and Washington D.C.
Submitted by Bob Burton on
In a February 1989 speech to the Executive Committee of the now-defunct Tobacco Institute, the group's Senior Vice President, Charles Powers, sought to save the industry's covert "Scientific Witness" program from impending budget cuts.
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