October 23, 2009 – 9:48 am
For those who’ve been following the Croakey debate on the “healthy” rebranding of soft drinks, here’s an interesting story from the LA Times health blog following up the implications of health and medical organisations taking funding from soft drink companies and other vested interests.
It turns out the doctors aren’t the only ones taking Coca-Cola’s money. [...]
October 22, 2009 – 8:59 am
The debate between Derek Yach of PepsiCo and public health sceptics is being watched from afar.
Obesity control expert Professor Boyd Swinburn has sent in his observations while travelling in the US. He writes:
“I am currently in Boston and read with interest the comments about Derek Yach and Pepsi’s PR mission to Australia.
The TV in the [...]
October 22, 2009 – 8:51 am
As previously mentioned in Croakey posts and in this Crikey story, a tobacco control advocate turned senior PepsiCo executive, Derek Yach, recently debated public health nutritionist Rosemary Stanton at the University of Sydney. He has asked for right of reply to the Crikey piece.
He writes:
“The pity is that Melissa clearly did not absorb the objective [...]
October 21, 2009 – 6:30 pm
Following on from the previous post about the healthy rebranding of soft drinks, Terry Slevin of Cancer Council WA, has sent in the following comment:
“To my frustration I missed the Rosemary and Derek show at Sydney Uni – but it would have been a bit of a drive home…
But it seems we are asked to [...]
October 21, 2009 – 1:52 pm
I wrote a piece for Crikey today looking at how the soft drink companies are trying to rebrand themselves as the new best friends of public health.
In the US, Coca Cola has done a deal with the American Academy of Family Physicians new corporate membership program, enabling it to help “educate consumers about the role [...]
October 21, 2009 – 9:19 am
If you lived in the US, you’d know.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Merck has just released its list of payments to doctors for giving talks at promotional events. The list also includes some nurses, pharmacists and scientists.
The payments range from $150 to more than $20,000.
The paper reports that many drug companies are moving to [...]
October 13, 2009 – 9:04 pm
As mentioned recently, Pfizer is hitting the consumer and medical media in the interests of its combination heart pill, Caduet.
Regular readers may remember that earlier this year Michele Kosky, executive director of the Health Consumers’ Council in WA, asked the TGA and Medicines Australia to investigate whether the consumer advertisement breaches the ban on direct-to-consumer [...]
October 2, 2009 – 6:27 pm
According to the Daily Telegraph, McDonald’s has “pulled off one of the marketing coups of the year” by signing up more than 230,000 NSW students to its maths tutoring program.
The paper says that 46 per cent of the state’s secondary students have registered for the Maths Online tutoring program. Nationally, more than a third of [...]
September 28, 2009 – 3:38 pm
The medical magazines, Australian Doctor and Medical Observer, have been carrying bright red, full-page advertisements from Pfizer, advising doctors that “patients will soon be asking about their suitability for combination heart medications”.
The advertisement includes a sample from a consumer advertising campaign that advises readers to talk to their doctor about a combination heart pill if [...]
September 22, 2009 – 8:46 pm
The announcement last Friday that the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has approved CSL’s vaccine against swine flu and that a national vaccination campaign will be rolled out in the next few weeks means two things:
• a lot of people must be working pretty hard and wondering how on earth they’re going to pull it all [...]
