Archive for June 2010
Jonathan Leake’s take on the embargo system
In the course of an email exchange Sunday about an alleged embargo break of a study about predicting the timing of menopause, The Sunday Times’ Jonathan Leake offered these thoughts on the embargo system. I found them provocative and thoughtful, and felt they deserved an airing in their own post:
My early years in newspaper journalism were spent covering political and health issues and these involved attending lots of meetings for which agendas would be circulated in advance. We would scour these agendas to hunt out the issues that made good stories. The aim was always to get these sorts of documents first and find the best stories first. Waiting for a press officer to issue an embargoed press release and then publishing on a date specified by them would have got you the sack pretty fast. The same still applies in most areas of journalism – except science. Why is that? Read the rest of this entry »
This blog is embargoed until June 30: I’m going on vacation

Photo by voght via flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/voght/
My wife and I are leaving tomorrow for a 10-day-long vacation during which I don’t plan to have much, if any, web access. So go ahead, journalists, break all the embargoes you want. Press officers, come up with freakishly bizarre embargo policies. Keep up the short embargo race. Ingelfinger yourselves into oblivion.
In the spirit of coming close to, but not quite, breaking the embargo on where we’re going, I won’t name the place. I’ll just say that it’s a country whose name is a bird in English, and that sources say there is a city there that was once called Constantinople.
Oh, and the only kind of embargoes I know about there involve trade, particularly the arms trade. Of course, if there are any Embargo Watch readers in this unnamed country, please ping me today or tomorrow.
I’ll be sure to catch up on all of the activity once I’m back, and I look forward to seeing lots of tips in my inbox, as always.
Trade mag and blog break coffee-head and neck cancer study embargo
Minutes after I posted that I was putting Embargo Watch under embargo until June 30, we got this notice from the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR):
The embargo has been lifted on the AACR press release: “Coffee May Protect Against Head and Neck Cancers,” due to a violation by Drug Discovery and Development and the Sci-Tech Heretic blog. Reporters may post their stories effective immediately. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s not just the Ingelfinger Rule: Scientists don’t want other scientists scooping them either
One of our stringers was recently pitched what sounded like a worthwhile study coming out in a journal the press officer described as a “major” one in its field. Great, I said, let’s see the manuscript, which I figured was under embargo.
Sorry, can’t show you that, you can only go on the gossamer of information we’ve released, because we don’t know when the study will be published yet. When we pushed, we found out it that it was in fact a major journal in its field. But it was also a journal that definitely embargoes, and that would certainly not be happy to see anything substantive in the press about the study.
American Diabetes Association posts conference abstracts online, but please don’t write about them
Yesterday, the American Diabetes Association (ADA) announced that the abstracts for their upcoming meeting in Orlando, Florida, are available. I found out about that on Twitter, in a tweet in which the ADA noted its embargo policy. When I clicked on the link they sent out, I read this: Read the rest of this entry »
Will David Graham’s Avandia study fall victim to the Ingelfinger Rule?
Last week, an unpublished study by researchers including longtime Avandia critic and FDA reviewer David Graham — who was a well-known Vioxx critic before that — made a bit of a splash after it was leaked to Pharmalot’s Ed Silverman. The study found, Ed reported:
48,000 excess events attributable to Avandia among patients 65 years or older between 1999 and June 2009. And since 62 percent of Avandia use has been among people younger than 65, they estimate the national impact is probably 100,000 or more.
I’ll leave summarizing the findings to Ed, who deserves the kind of traffic this scoop should get. You can also read the manuscript, which the authors were planning to submit to JAMA. According to emails leaked along with the manuscript, they were concerned that the FDA would try to block their submission.
Larry Husten, at Cardiobrief, picked up on the news, and ended his post with this: Read the rest of this entry »
More thoughts on ASCO: How the embargo policy can lead to hype
American Cancer Society deputy chief medical officer Len Lichtenfeld had a smart post last week commenting on a study presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) of whether adding bevacizumab (Avastin) to standard treatments for ovarian cancer would benefit patients.
That study had been covered positively by much of the media, but Len described how Elizabeth Eisenhauer, of the National Cancer Institute of Canada and Queen’s University in Kingston, had raised some questions about it when it was presented. I’ll leave those important details for you to read in his post, but let’s just say that Len thought her questions threw some appropriate cold water on the hype. She “concluded that more work needs to be done before this regimen can be considered as a standard treatment option for women with advanced ovarian cancer,” he wrote.
That cold water didn’t make it into most of the stories on the study. What happened? Len explained: Read the rest of this entry »