Remember last month when Merck CEO Dick Clark remarked on Big Pharma's "trust deficit [0]?" Well, here's quantitative evidence of it. A European Commission study found that healthcare professionals and payers are "mostly suspicious" of drugmakers as sources of information about drugs. Nearly half of the responders said pharma has too many conflicts of interest to be appropriate sources of general information on medications.

Some of the responses, however, indicated that if drug companies provided a clear distinction between ads and information, they could be valuable repositories because of their intimate knowledge of their products.

The opinions will be factored into decisions about a proposed code of conduct governing the release of info about pharmaceuticals in the E.U.

- see the item [1] at Pharmalot
- check out the PharmaTimes story [2]

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Pharma CEOs mull industry "trust deficit" [2]
Survey: No doubt DTC ads work [2]
10 reforms for drug advertising [3]