How Conflicts of Interest Have Corrupted the CDC

Conflicts of interest have become more the rule than the occasional exception. Even the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) receives heavy funding from industry. A 2009 investigation by the Office of the Inspector General concluded the CDC has “a systemic lack of oversight of the ethics program”; 97 percent of disclosure forms filed by its advisors were incomplete. The editor-in-chief of the Lancet recently published a statement declaring that a lot of published research is unreliable at best; about half is completely false.