Healthy Skepticism Library item: 6312

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Publication type: news

Boseley S, Gow D.
Support for cancer group naive, says MP
Guardian 2006 Oct 20
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329605564-107979,00.html

Full text:

Support for cancer group naive, says MP
· Drug manufacturer’s role ‘was not made clear’
· Former No 10 spokesman expresses his dismay

Sarah Boseley and David Gow
Friday October 20, 2006
Guardian

A Labour MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on cancer said last
night that he had been “naive” to get involved with Cancer United, a
pan-European campaign mired in controversy over drug company sponsorship.
Ian Gibson, a former chair of the science and technology select committee,
was invited to be filmed for the launch of the campaign during the Labour
conference in Manchester.
“They had taken rooms in a hotel,” he said. “They invited people to come and
say some positive things about the issue on camera. I said who had they got
and they said they had other celebrities, like Alastair Campbell.”
Mr Campbell, the prime minister’s former spokesman, said he was “upset” he
had become involved.
Dr Gibson said he understood the campaign was about equal access to cancer
treatment across Europe, but he did not know the sole funder was Roche, the
world’s biggest manufacturer of cancer drugs, until the Guardian revealed it
on Wednesday.
The campaign’s secretariat is Weber Shandwick, Roche’s PR company in
Brussels, and a senior Roche official sits on the campaign’s executive
board.
Mr Campbell, the former Downing Street press secretary, recorded an
interview in support of the campaign when he was approached several months
ago.
“I thought it was a European Union campaign on cancer awareness,” said Mr
Campbell, a long-standing supporter of research in the fight against
leukaemia.
“I’m more upset because I thought I had an agreement I would be able to use
it to promote work on leukaemia research but that appears not to be the
case.”
Pre-launch publicity indicated the campaign would rely heavily on a report
from the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, which claimed that cancer survival
was linked to a country’s spending on drugs – and which was also funded by
Roche.
An MEP and the head of the European Cancer Patients Coalition, the Guardian
revealed, have withdrawn from the campaign’s executive board over concerns
about its independence and lack of transparency over its funding.
Dr Gibson says he has now pulled out of any involvement. “I feel very silly
and stupid,” he said.
At the sparsely attended campaign launch in Brussels yesterday, Cancer
United said the aim was to promote equal access to the best forms of cancer
care across the EU’s 25 countries and denied that it was the plaything of a
commercial exercise. Campaign leaders also rejected accusations that its
sole aim was to lobby EU institutions and national governments for more
money to combat cancer.
The campaign admitted the funding from Roche, which makes Herceptin for
breast cancer and Avastin for bowel cancer, and “logistical support” from
Weber Shandwick. But John Smyth, the campaign’s chairman and professor of
medical oncology at Edinburgh University, said Roche had simply paid for two
visits of 12 board members to Brussels.
On BBC Radio 4’s Today, Professor Michel Coleman from the London School of
Hygiene and Tropical Medicine criticised the Karolinska report, which
claimed cancer survival was directly linked to a country’s spending on
drugs. “The research on which Cancer United is being launched is faulty,”
Prof Coleman said. One of its major failings was that it matched drug
availability against survival data for patients from a period up to 10 years
earlier.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2006