Drug Companies Spend Millions on Direct Advertising

Following on from the attack by NICE on the drug industry in The Observer, The Guardian reveals today that the drug industry plows millions into persuading medical professionals to use their products. According to the report:

Drug companies are spending millions of pounds every year on all-expenses-paid trips to conferences around the world for doctors and other hospital staff, in what critics say is a massive marketing exercise dressed up as medical education.

The Guardian can reveal the scale of pharmaceutical company sponsorship following an examination of the registers of gifts and donations to doctors that all hospitals are required to keep. They show considerable largesse - from drug companies regularly picking up hefty bills for travel to international conferences in Europe, Asia and America, to specialist nurses' salaries, and weekly sandwich lunches for hospital staff training sessions.

Examples of the firms' hospitality include:

· Astra Zeneca paid £2,500 for a doctor at the Royal Bournemouth trust and £1,500 for a doctor at Sheffield teaching hospital to attend a cancer conference in Texas

· Sanofi-Aventis, the world's fourth biggest pharmaceutical company, paid for doctors at the Countess of Chester trust to go to conferences in Cape Town, New Orleans and Barcelona. At Gateshead trust, their reps gave a breakfast for 30 staff "to discuss drugs for the treatment of breast cancer". The trust's register records that "the donor was seeking to secure business".

· Roche spent £2,000 for an oncology consultant at Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge to go to a conference in May last year.

· GSK, the biggest British pharmaceutical company, paid £1,200 for a consultant at Sheffield teaching hospital to attend the 11th international congress of Parkinson's disease and movement disorders in Turkey last June.

· Companies have also been taking hospital staff to top football and rugby matches. Carillion, a public sector construction firm, spent £180 taking a senior manager at Milton Keynes trust to lunch and then a rugby match at Twickenham last August.


Fortunately, drug companies cannot advertise direct to the patient......yet. Only last year, drug companies and so-called 'patient groups' (funded by drugs companies funnily enough) lobbied the European parliament to relax the regulations on direct advertising. Should these patient groups be successful in battering NICE into submission, there is no doubt that the pressure would increase to allow the drug companies to advertise direct to the patient - a very dangerous prospect indeed when one considers the issues surrounding drugs such as Vioxx.

These are dangerous times in the medical world. Drug companies are scared of a decline in profits that will inevitably follow the expiration of their lucrative patents. This fear will drive them to ever ambitious attempts to secure their bottom line and patient groups are one of their biggest weapons. NICE must be allowed to carry out its work, no matter how hard it is for some patients to accept, or else we could find ourselves in a dangerous world where drugs are rushed to the market place after insufficient testing - leading to many more cases like Vioxx. NICE does a very difficult job, but it deserves everyone's support.

No More Mr Nice Guy

For too long the media have focused on one side of the story when it comes to the debate about medication. Nice has been portrayed as a vicious, uncaring watchdog seeking to penalise those that require certain medications. That some of this criticism seems to emanate from various pharmaceutical concerns, barely seems worth mentioning. Finally, today's Observer goes some way to addressing this gross distortion and, in turn, reveals the real criminals in the drugs industry.

Professor Sir Michael Rawlins has finally spoken out about the media frenzy surrounding Nice, and what he says makes an awful lot of sense. Sure, the drug companies will be infuriated (and no doubt up their propaganda campaigns), but the truth is for all to see. Drugs companies are overcharging the NHS in order to protect their profits. This needs to stop. If things continue in this fashion, the NHS will be bled dry and the way will be clear for a privatised system somewhat like the one in the US. Free healthcare for all will become a curiosity of the past. Men, women and children will die as a result of a privatised system. Dramatic? Maybe. But there is no doubt that large sections of society will be severely affected by such a change.

Below is a short extract:

The drugs industry is overpricing vital new medicines to boost its profits, the chair of the health watchdog Nice warns today in an explosive intervention into the debate over NHS rationing.

Professor Sir Michael Rawlins spoke out after critics last week accused the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) of 'barbarism' for refusing to approve expensive new kidney drugs for NHS use, on the grounds that they were not cost-effective.

In an outspoken interview with The Observer, he warned of 'perverse incentives' to hike the prices of new drugs - including linking the pay of pharmaceutical company executives to their firm's share price, which in turn relied on keeping profits healthy. Traditionally some companies charged what they thought they could get away with, he said. 'We are told we are being mean all the time, but what nobody mentions is why the drugs are so expensive.'

Kidney cancer drugs could be produced for about a tenth of their current cost, Rawlins said. While developing such medicines from scratch added to these costs, as did some 'unnecessary' bureaucracy around clinical trials which should be scrapped, he said that was not the whole story. 'Part of the problem is that the pharmaceutical industry is looking at a very bad period in the future because a lot of their big earners are going off patent [allowing rivals to make cheaper versions], and many companies are looking at a 30 or 40 per cent reduction in the next five years unless they come up with new drugs,' he said. 'And so part of the cost is cushioning against that. The other thing, of course, is that the share price is very important to a pharmaceutical company.'