Sponsors Behind Patient Interest Groups

Health and medicine is big business, and everybody wants to get a share of it. Now, we don't want to demand industry or scientists, again, to disclose competing interests but the patients' groups. They hardly exist without support by the industry, writes the Lancet (1.7.2006) in an editorial. The paper reports a case where the UK charity CancerBACKUP recommends the drug Herceptin against breast cancer without pointing to side effects or critics of its use. Well, according to the Lancet the charity's sponsor and the drug's maker are the same.