I don't have any hope for more research money.  If there's not a profit to be made somewhere, people have less money to give away (as in charitable funding), more money comes out of your pocket for taxes, I don't expect people to line up and give money to prove breastfeeding is better.  Maybe I'm a cynic.  When the government runs out of money to give free formula, maybe more poor women will opt to breastfeed?  The fact that people are selling formula at Flea Markets and second hand shops is worrisome about what is being done with government money! 

-----Original Message-----
From: Lactation Information and Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Susan Burger
Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 8:46 AM
Subject: Re: Research funding

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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