Abott Lab removed the sentence "increased risk of cancer" as mentioned for their arthritis drug Adalimumab (brand name Humira) on Wikipedia.
Two minutes later, someone with the username Gscshoyru, whose Wikipedia profile describes him as a “recent changes patroller,” added the information back to the entry.
Jeffrey Light, who runs the one-man nonprofit Patients not Patents used Wikipedia Scanner to see what the drug industry had been up to on Wikipedia. He made a press release on this subject, you can download this press release from the article on HealthBlog from the Wall Street Journal.
Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith.
This software offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.
This is the second drug company that was discovered doing this. The other company was AstraZeneca for their drug seroquel. Would like to use WikiScanner on some other drug companies as well, but it takes a lot of time.
Other post on this subject on this blog:
Drug company rewrites entry on Wikipedia
2 comments:
Post a Comment