British Journal Urges Roche to Release Data on Tamiflu
The British Medical Journal has asked pharmaceutical company Roche to release all its data on the drug Tamiflu.
"I suggest we boycott Roche's products until they publish missing Tamiflu data," said Peter Gotzsche, leader of the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen, Denmark, The Associated Press reported. The drug is already on World Health Organization's list of essential medicines and billions of dollars have been spent on stockpiling the drug in many countries.
In December 2009, Roche had promised to release full clinical trial reports of drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu) in response to a major investigation by the BMJ and researchers Peter Doshi and Tom Jefferson from the Cochrane Collaboration, a statement from BMJ said.
"Despite a public promise to release (internal company reports) for each (Tamiflu) trial...Roche has stonewalled," journal editor Fiona Godlee wrote in an editorial last month.
According to Medline Plus, the drug Oseltamivir is used to treat some types of influenza infection ('flu') in adults and children (older than 1 year of age) who have had symptoms of the flu for no longer than 2 days.
Tamiflu was widely used in the 2009 swine flu outbreak, The Associated Press reported.
"Roche has made full clinical study data - including the studies from Kaiser et al paper- available to the national health authorities according to their various requirements, so they can conduct their own analyses," said Roche in a statement.
BMJ has even published an interactive Timeline on Tamiflu.