corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 9035

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

GlaxoSmithKline admits to misleading public over Ribena
ABC News (Australia) 2007 Mar 27
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2007-03-27/glaxosmithkline-admits-to-misleading-public-over/2227348


Full text:

Global pharmaceutical and food giant GlaxoSmithKline has admitted to misleading the public over the Vitamin C content of blackcurrent drink Ribena.

The company faced charges alleging 15 breaches of New Zealand’s Fair Trading Act.

New Zealand’s Commerce Commission launched the prosecution after two Auckland school students carried out tests on Ribena as part of a science project.

The Auckland District Court heard today that the commission said while television advertising suggested blackcurrants had four times the vitamin C of oranges, the same could not be said of Ribena.

In fact tests showed ready-to-drink Ribena contained no detectable vitamin C at all.

Anna Devathasan and Jenny Suo, the teenagers who first blew the whistle on Ribena three years ago, were in court to hear the company’s guilty plea.

GlaxoSmithKline, which last week made similar admissions in Australia, faces fines of up to $2.5 million.

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








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