Dear Friends
The European Medicines Agency is changing its data sharing policy in
response to pressure from all of us. At its board meeting yesterday Executive
Director
Professor Guido Rasi tabled amendments to remove the
on-screen-only access clause and to allow researchers to download, save and
print clinical study reports. This is great. The policy will now be closer
to the original draft the EMA published in June and that hundreds of us
supported.
Yesterday’s improvement to the policy only happened because hundreds of
researchers, patients and citizens called for it. We’ve heard that a number of
the attendees at the meeting didn’t know there had been any criticisms of the
policy. If our correspondence hadn’t been tabled the changes probably wouldn’t
have been voted through. Huge well done to everyone who wrote, this is down to
you.
Of course allowing downloading of the data isn’t
everything we
called for. We don’t know if there are going to be changes to the redaction
policy or to the terms of use that would allow third parties to sue researchers
but we don’t think there will be. The EMA is finalising the text of the policy
over the next few weeks and we understand it will be published in September.
Read
our comments about it here and share this news. Please, get more people
to
sign the petition. Share
the campaign video with as many people as you can and
ask them to share it too.
Best wishes
Ian Bushfield
Campaigns Support Officer
Sense About Science
www.AllTrials.net
www.SenseAboutScience.org
A simple formula can help physicians identify which emergency room patients with vague complaints need rapid treatment.
Physicians at the University Hospital Basel in Switzerland asked psychologist Mirjam Jenny of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin to develop the diagnostic tool. The physicians had identified 88 signs of serious illness in 1,278 ER patients who had described nebulous problems
