Conflict-of-Interest.net

It looks like the WHO is again (after the H1N1 situation) facing COI allegations with regards to industry involvement in its expert advisory panels. This time, there is Concern as Novartis exec approved to WHO group. Paul Herrling, the Swiss head of corporate research at Novartis, has been named to a WHO expert group that will evaluate funding applications for projects into neglected tropical diseases. Not only is “the only expert in the group who is also an executive in the drugs industry“, but he is also “the author of a proposal to the same working group for a new funding model that would allocate $10 billion (SFr9.42 billion) in grants to fund research by pharmaceutical firms as well as public research institutes and public private partnerships”. Even if the WHO can put in place effective mechanisms to manage these COI, the optics are still terrible!

With disclosure becoming the key mechanism promoted to manage COI in academic — and especially biomedical — conferences and other educational events, its interesting to see that there is still enormous work to do so that academics and clinicians even understand what and when to disclose. As the following story reports “Conflict of Interest Reporting Varies Among Spine Meetings”

There is a lack of uniformity among disclosure policies of various medical associations, and confusion regarding what relationships need acknowledgement results in variability in the reporting of financial conflicts of interest in clinical research, according to research published in the January issue of The Spine Journal [full text of the study]