Bribery of German docs by drug companies reported

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Bribery of German docs by drug companies reported



By Hannah Cleaver



BERLIN, Mar 11 (Reuters Health) - At least 1,000 alleged cases of corruption of doctors by large pharmaceutical firms have been cited in Germany. The companies are allegedly encouraging doctors to prescribe more expensive drug treatments.



Many doctors have received offers of free trips for training seminars in

glamorous places that happened to coincide with Formula One races or

football World Cup championship games--with entry tickets often included in the hospitality, according to Bild am Sonntag, the German newspaper that carried the story on its front page this weekend.



One doctor, Hans-Peter Meuser from Langenfeld in the west of the country, told the medical newsletter Arzneitelegramm that in 1998 he had been invited along with a companion to attend a workshop in Paris, and the offer included tickets to the football World Cup final.



He said he would have been expected to treat at least 20 patients with a new high blood pressure drug and send the drug company short notes on the patients' progress. The new medication cost about seven times as much as similar drugs at that time.



The Munich public prosecutor, which is leading the overall investigation,

confirmed Monday that around 100 clinics and hospitals across Germany were involved. Of those institutions, 23 are in Munich.



Munich's public prosecutor spokesman Manfred Wick said the case started in 1999 when a complaint was made against the firm SmithKline Beecham Pharma GmbH on suspicion of bribery and tax evasion.



Various offices of the pharmaceutical giant were raided on May 10, 2000, in Munich as well as some of Saechsisches Serumwerk in Dresden and Hoechst Marion Roussel in Frankfurt.



Around 600 files were taken from the SmithKline Beecham group while further raids were conducted on travel agent offices.



Wick said in a statement, "After evaluating the files, it showed up that the firm SmithKline Beecham had laid on many training seminars, meetings and congresses in Germany as well as abroad for doctors, which hospital doctors and companions had taken part in, where the travel costs were paid by SmithKline Beecham.



"The evaluation of the circa 600 files confiscated from SmithKline Beecham in Munich, as well as the files from various travel agents showed that around 5,800 single payments were made through the pharmaceutical firm to doctors in hospitals or public institutes."



The payments ranged from several thousand deutschmarks to up to 50,000 DM, he said.



Initially, more than 3,000 investigations were launched but these were

narrowed down to around 1,000. Around 380 investigations have been opened against the staff of SmithKline Beecham.



On Monday, GlaxoSmithKline released a statement that stressed the structural changes that had taken place since the company's merger on December 27, 2000.



"As far as we can find out, the allegations concern the time between 1997 and 1999," the statement reads. "The fusion of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham prompted a restructuring and many positions have been redefined and re-staffed; responsibilities have changed."



The firm said in the statement that it had no further information beyond that which had been given to the media.



Doctors have been outraged by the allegations. The Federal Doctors'

Association issued a statement suggesting that its members had before--and were now being--targeted in order to take attention away from a party political funding scandal currently being uncovered in the media.



The Association's president Professor Joerg-Dietrich Hoppe said in the

statement, "Fraud and bribery should not just be investigated by the public prosecutor but also and initially by the doctors' association. We have no doubt about that. We wrote that in the professional code of conduct. But it is frivolous to compare the alleged acceptance of advantages by a number of individual doctors to the fraudulent practices of the political parties, and looks like a cheap diversionary tactic."



But Dr. Ellis Huber, former president of the Association's Berlin branch,

told Bild am Sonnag, "A third of doctors are cynical and unscrupulously

oriented, a third keep to the ethical rules, and a third sway somewhere between the two. Moral principles have been mislaid in this profession. The power of the marketing people has overgrown the power of the medics and researchers."



The country's biggest health insurer AOK said Monday night it would try to reclaim any charges it had paid that could be traced to additional costs incurred by bribed doctors.



Copyright ?2002 Reuters Limited.