Academic Researchers Fail To Report Conflicts

An article today in the New York Times simply blows my mind. I'll just quote from it:

"Few universities make required reports to the government about the financial conflicts of their researchers, and even when such conflicts are reported, university administrators rarely require those researchers to eliminate or reduce these conflicts, government investigators found.

"In a report expected to be made public on Thursday, Daniel R. Levinson, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, said 90 percent of universities relied solely on the researchers themselves to decide whether the money they made in consulting and other relationships with drug and device makers was relevant to their government-financed research.

"And half of universities do not ask their faculty members to disclose the amount of money or stock they make from drug and device makers, so the potential for extensive conflicts with their government-financed research is often known only to the researchers themselves, the report concluded."

That should shake everyone up because these universities, collectively, take in billions a year in federal research funding yet apparently refuse or are too lazy to monitor whether the researchers getting federal funds are also getting unreported pharma monies. The whole thing is downright Nemeroffian. I'm not sure what needs to happen to clean this system up but I think it's outrageous that these same researchers are the types of "experts" the media quotes in health stories that instruct the public in how to behave and these are the same folks who would likely claim to be "highly ethical" (and probably teach medical students in medical ethics) yet they're violating research ethics all over the place.

It's stories and reports such as the above that make me deeply distrustful of our health care system and the pronouncements of experts. It's simply not that hard to do the right thing and play by the rules and it's very telling that loads of researchers in various disciplines don't seem to care.