Tuesday, January 24, 2006

CORRECTION: Conflict of Interest Was Disclosed to Journal in Tobacco/Obesity Litigation Article

In response to my January 23 (yesterday's) post entitled "Potential Conflict of Interest Not Disclosed in Journal Article Promoting Obesity Lawsuits," Professor Daynard has informed me that he did in fact disclose to the American Journal of Preventive Medicine that he did have a potential conflict of interest with regard to his article entitled "Applying Lessons from Tobacco Litigation to Obesity Lawsuits" (Alderman J, Daynard RA. Applying lessons from tobacco litigation to obesity lawsuits. Am J Prev Med 2006; 30:82-88).

Specifically, Professor Daynard informs me that he did disclose the conflict of interest with regards to obesity litigation, noting in his faxed conflict of interest form to the Journal that: "I may become involved with a group of attorneys bringing cases against soda manufacturers to get soda machines removed from schools" and also noting his relationship with the Public Health Advocacy Institute.

While I have first, corrected this in the original post, and later, removed that post entirely for simplicity, I wanted to issue this separate correction and also apologize to Dr. Daynard for incorrectly implying that he had failed to notify the journal of this potential conflict of interest.

The implication that the author denied having any conflict of interest at all was incorrect, and I apologize for incorrectly implying that was the case here. The journal erred in not printing the disclosed conflict of interest. I apologize to Dr. Daynard for not having the decency to call him to confirm that he did not disclose the conflict before writing the post.

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