NIH Blasted for Conflicts of Interest

The Center for Science in the Public Interest knit together a coalition of more than 40 top physicians and over a dozen consumers groups to protest an upcoming meeting at the National Institutes of Health on how to prevent mother-child transmission of herpes. Four of five presenters at the Feb. 20 meeting have financial ties GlaxoSmithKline, which makes the anti-herpes drug Valtrex. The protesters are calling for NIH to forbid scientists with such blatant conflicts of interest from sitting on committees that write clinical practice guidelines. When such guidelines come from NIH, they're generally given a lot of weight by the medical profession.

Signers of the protest letter included Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, and former New England Journal of Medicine editors Marcia Angell and Jerome Kassirer. A number of women's health organizations also signed onto the letter. You can read the press release and the letter here.