Advisers on Vaccines Often Have Conflicts, Report Says (CDC)

[Crunchy Frog]

By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: December 17, 2009
WASHINGTON — A new report finds that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did a poor job of screening medical experts for financial conflicts when it hired them to advise the agency on vaccine safety, officials said Thursday.

Most of the experts who served on advisory panels in 2007 to evaluate vaccines for flu and cervical cancer had potential conflicts that were never resolved, the report said. Some were legally barred from considering the issues but did so anyway.

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As numerous medicines have been pulled from the market in recent years, worries have grown that experts may be recommending medical products — even ones they know to be unsafe — in part because manufacturers are paying them. As a result, government agencies, medical societies and medical journals have become increasingly insistent that experts disclose potential conflicts. And while the experts invariably insist that they have done so, government audits routinely find large gaps between these disclosures and the experts’ actual income from consulting.

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Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who said she had long been a supporter of the C.D.C., said: “That is why I am so concerned about this report issued by the inspector general exposing serious ethics violations within the C.D.C. All members of the federal advisory committees, whose recommendations direct federal policy, should be without conflict of interest.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/health/policy/18cdc.html?_r=2&ref=us