June 30, 2003	Monday	Rabi-us-Sani 29,1424

CANBERRA: In what is likely to be a world first, the Australian government’s consumer protection agency has proposed that major drug companies be required to publish on a website details of all offers they have made to sponsor doctors’ travel, accommodation and other promotional benefits.

The disclosure requirements sought by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) would not only affect overseas trips of Australian doctors, but those of doctors in the Asia-Pacific region being sponsored by Australian companies, including on trips to events in Australia.

According to a spokeswoman for the ACCC, the proposal would require disclosure by Australian-based drug companies along with deals offered by their overseas head offices for events in and outside Australia.

These would then be uploaded onto the website of the peak lobbying group of the drug industry, Medicines Australia.

The proposals are a step forward, says Martyn Goddard, senior policy officer with the Australian Consumers Association. “The drug companies are global so they may well have an office in Britain. But they will also have got an office in Sydney, so if they ask a doctor in Adelaide to go to Aberdeen in Scotland then that will be handled through the Sydney office and bang! It goes up on the website.”

“This requirement is really going to cut down these sorts of inappropriate marketing deals,” he said in an interview.

While the Asia-Pacific market accounts for only $25 billion of the $351 billion global pharmaceutical industry, the Australian offices of the global drug companies have been aiming to supply an increasing share of the regional pharmaceutical market.

For instance, participants at a session on the marketing challenges in the Asia-Pacific region at a mid-May conference on pharmaceutical marketing in Sydney suggested that Korea, Taiwan and Singapore were viewed as markets that were “taking off”.

China and India, while having large population bases, were classed as “awakening” markets due to their current heavy reliance on generic off-patent drugs, rather than the more expensive and profitable brand-name drugs manufactured by global drug companies.

The ACCC proposal follows public revelations two years ago of an ‘educational’ meeting that was held for 270 doctors aboard a cruise boat on Sydney Harbour. Apart from listening to lectures on drug treatments for heart disease, the assembled doctors were treated to a floorshow replete with dancing women. At other meetings, the doctors were also treated to lavish dinners at top restaurants by drug companies.

Stung by the adverse publicity, the industry proposed the tightening of its self-regulatory code. In assessing the application to the ACCC by Medicines Australia, the regulator sought advice from consumer and doctors’ groups.

In issuing its draft ruling, the ACCC said: “Doctors’ prescribing habits are likely to be influenced by the provision of benefits by pharmaceutical companies. Where this results in doctors prescribing medicines, which are not the most appropriate choice for their patient (according to the available scientific evidence), it is likely to harm patients.”

“The conditions will improve the (regulatory) code’s ability to prevent drug companies’ marketing activities inappropriately influencing doctors’ prescribing decisions,” the ACCC said in a statement announcing the decision.

The ACCC also proposed that Medicines Australia also be required to publish full details of all breaches of the code on its website. The director of the global public health group Healthy Scepticism, Peter Mansfield, welcomes the proposals but believes they should have gone further. “There are little steps but the house is burning down,” he said.

Mansfield, a general practitioner, believes that a better model would have been to have a web-based system so that patients could look up their local doctors and see which ones had accepted gifts from drug firms.

More problematic, he argues, is that while doctors’ attendance at educational meetings will be disclosed, what occurs in one-on-one meetings with sales representatives of drug companies will not be included. “I would have thought that is the highest risk. At least in a meeting there are other people around to see what is going on,” he said.

In a special theme edition in late May, the prestigious British Medical Journal editorialized against the courting of doctors by drug companies. “Sponsored conferences and compromised medical education. Courtesy golf and unaffordable holidays. Thought leaders and ghostwriters.’’—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.