Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14461

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Dutch advisory body hit by funding scandal
Radio Netherlands/ Expatica 2008 Oct 19
http://www.expatica.com/nl/articles/news/Dutch-advisory-body-hit-by-funding-scandal.html#send

Full text:

Doctors and researchers at the Health Council of the Netherlands received research funding from pharmaceutical companies.

Current affairs programme Zembla reports that doctors and researchers at the Health Council of the Netherlands received research funding from pharmaceutical companies.

The Health Council is an independent body that advises the Dutch government and parliament on public health issues.

It recently advised Health Minister Ab Klink that girls should be vaccinated against cervical cancer. At the same time, its members were receiving funding from the vaccines’ manufacturers.

Today, the Health Inspectorate raided the offices of two manufacturers, Sanofi Pasteur MSD and GlaxoSmithKline. They seized documents and correspondence.

The Socialist Party is demanding a parliamentary debate on the issue. The party’s chairperson Agnes Kant accuses the companies of being far too aggressive in their marketing and their efforts to influence decision-making.

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909