Re: BMJ Imbroglio background

["Masterson, Michele" <Michele_Masterson@simbanet.com>]

[MOD. NOTE:  Attached are only the first few paragraphs of the New York
Times piece; sorry 'bout that but:  (1) reproducing the full article to
some 3,000 readers seemed to me to verge on infringement; and (2) even
more to the point, the limits of listproc were reached and well exceeded
by the length of the message.  Good news: Michele has given us a lot of
information by which to locate the full article and the details of the
situation, for which many thanks.]

Some of you have written to me asking for more background regarding this
issue. Here is the republication of an article from the 1/18/05 NY Times
concerning the BMJ/Eli Lilly controversy. Please also note that the NYT
printed a correction below the original article.

Again, any thoughts/reactions regarding implications for STM publishing 
would be greatly appreciated!

Best,

Michele Masterson
Simba Information
Stamford, CT

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Dispute Puts a Medical Journal Under Fire
NY Times
BUSINESS/FINANCIAL DESK | January 17, 2005, Monday

Last year was an especially bad one for the pharmaceutical industry, which
experienced controversies over how drug studies are disclosed and the
implosion of the painkiller Vioxx, as a result of the recent publication
of an article about the antidepressant Prozac, it appears that the staid,
usually methodical world of medical journals could suffer its own black
eye.

On New Year's Day, the British medical journal BMJ published a news
article suggesting that "missing" documents from a decade-old lawsuit
indicated that Eli Lilly & Company, the maker of Prozac, had minimized
data about the drug's risks of causing suicidal or violent behavior.
Within days, the article was cited in hundreds of television and newspaper
reports. An outraged Washington lawmaker demanded to know if Lilly had
hidden the information from the Food and Drug Administration.  While
company officials refuted the article's assertions, it was still
repeatedly cited. And last Thursday, Lilly spent about $800,000 to run
full-page advertisements in 15 major publications to dispute the article.

The incident may prove to be a messy one for the BMJ, which is based in
London and owned by the British Medical Association, a professional group.
Much of the journal, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, is
devoted to research reports about medical issues that are reviewed by
experts. But the BMJ, like some other medical journals, also has a
separate news section that prints articles like the recent one about
Prozac. As it turns out, some of the Eli Lilly documents, which the BMJ
said it received from an anonymous source, have been circulating for
years. And, Lilly officials said, the BMJ and its reporter declined to
provide the company with copies of the documents at issue prior to the
article's publication.

[SNIP]

Copyright The New York Times 2005
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