Dear all:

I'm calling on all of you who has had the experience of being frustrated by the fact that 
so much of the research articles we read are funded by sources that are fraught with 
conflicts of interest.  This is not just in our field.  Even my dentist who likes to keep up on 
all the latest research complains that she finds it a huge challenge to tease out what is 
marketing and what is actual research.

I've been mulling this over ever since Valerie McClain again corrected my assumptions.  
There in black and white (and to her credit completely transparent) was the Nestle grant 
that Kay Dewey received during a period when I thought she had not yet received money 
from formula industry sources. During that period, she still questioned me intensely about 
the implications of my doctoral dissertation research and was completely convinced that 
four months was too soon for introduction of solids.

The Nestle grants were always problematic when I did my doctoral dissertation research.  
Unlike some fields and institutions, graduate students in international nutrition were 
required to seek their own funding for their doctoral dissertation research.  I cannot tell 
you how many grants I wrote seeking funding and it took me more than a decade to toss 
the grant proposals.  Sources of funding were limited.  I gave up doing research on iodine 
deficiency (one of the biggest causes of permanent mental retardation globally) because 
no one was interested.  Five years later, UNICEF dove into the problem in a big way.  
During this time, we had our own watch dog --- Sabu George who harangued us to death 
to keep our funding sources clean.  He was at Hopkins when I was doing my MHS and at 
Cornell when I was doing my PhD.  He still pops up from time to time on NPR pushing for 
some cause or another.  He was a total pain in the patootie and often right!  I did write a 
grant proposal to Nestle that was rejected on the flimsy reasoning that because iodine 
was unrelated, it was not a conflict of interest.  Fortunately, for my long term conscious -
-- my iodine proposal was not funded by Nestle.  It was tough then to get funding, and it 
has only become far more difficult to get funding.  While this does not negate the 
problem of individual conflicts of interest, it does mean that we should do everything in 
our power to encourage "Clean" funding sources.  It will not eliminate conflicts of 
interest, but would create an easier environment to avoid conflicts of interest.

In the US, we have a new administration coming in that has promised "change" and is 
intending to pour money into "change" for future economic growth.  Funding for basic 
research has been severely neglected and as in many areas, oversight of safety issues in 
many areas has been decimated.  The advertising for infant food has become more and 
more deceptive as regulations have been lifted or unenforced.  Regardless of your 
political leanings, it seems to me that we have a potential opportunity to encourage 
appropriately funded research on infant feeding and better oversight of misleading 
advertising.

Write your politicians, write the new administration.  We should be hammering on the 
door demanding change.

Best, Susan Burger

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