Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Happy Birthday Eliot! also Pharma Execs: "We're doing great!"

Sue Pelletier has a very fine blog called Capsules, focusing on pharma and medical meeting news. In a recent post she relays the story of a very good prank played on Express Scripts, a company being sued by NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer for $100 million for inflating the costs of generic drugs.

Stories like this renew your faith in your fellow man (well, for me they do).

On the opposite end of the continuum, there's this article from Ethical Corporation: US pharmaceutical industry ethics rated higher by executives than public.

A survey late last year by Rating Research among senior executives across the pharmaceutical industry found that 65% of executives interviewed "agreed" or "strongly agreed" that leading figures at major drug companies "adhere to ethical business practices".

But in a nationwide poll conducted by Opinion Research in early February only 44% of the 1,000 US citizens surveyed said they trusted senior leadership of major pharmaceutical makers to "engage in ethical business practices".

'Soo-prize, soo-prize, soo-prize!', as Gomer Pyle would say.

But wait, there's more:

Another public opinion survey was carried out in February by the Kaiser Family Foundation. It found that although 90% of adults said pharmaceutical companies made an important contribution by developing new drugs, half had an overall unfavourable view of the industry.

And 70% of participants in the Kaiser survey said the pharmaceutical industry put profits ahead of people.

There were some results sure to be excerpted for the in-house FDA mass emails and newsletters, though:

The study also found, however, that despite the recent controversy surrounding Cox-2 inhibitors like Vioxx, 80% of adults surveyed still felt confident about the safety of prescription medications sold in the US. 77% said they were confident in the Food and Drug Administration's ability to ensure drug safety.

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