More Conflicts of Interest

I'll defer to the good folks at Health Care Renewal on this one. Teaser follows...

"We have posted a lot about the story of wide-spread conflicts of interest affecting top leaders at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). After the NIH conflict of interest rules were relaxed in the mid-1990's, some top NIH managers received five- and six-figure consulting payments from pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Some failed to disclose these payments, even when writing journal articles favoring the products of the companies for which they worked. Since then, NIH Director Zerhouni made the organization's conflict of interest policies much more stringent, although not without opposition from some of his staff (see post here).

Most recently interest has focused on two cases. Dr Trey Sunderland, a leader within in the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), provided tissue samples to Pfizer Inc while receiving consulting fees from the drug company. (See posts here, here, and here.)"

Check out the full story here.