Health & Consumers

“Comment améliorer la couverture médiatique du sport féminin pour favoriser la pratique du sport pour toutes?”

C’est à cette question que tenteront de répondre les six intervenants réunis par le think tank Sport et Citoyenneté, groupe de réflexion et d’influence sur le sport en Europe, en partenariat avec la communauté urbaine de Strasbourg (CUS) et l’agence Quarterback, en charge de l’organisation des Internationaux de tennis de Strasbourg le 21 Mai.

Le constat est sans appel : si 37% des citoyennes européennes déclarent pratiquer régulièrement une activité physique et sportive, 85% de la couverture médiatique est dédiée à des sportifs masculins.
Dans ce contexte,  la communauté urbaine de Strasbourg (CUS), Quarterback et le think tank Sport et Citoyenneté souhaitent faire évoluer le débat sur « la médiatisation du sport féminin».
Les objectifs de cette table ronde seront de répondre aux enjeux suivants:

• Quelles sont les propositions concrètes pour répondre aux enjeux de la sous-médiatisation du sport féminin?
• Comment le rayonnement  médiatique d’un sport féminin contribue à l’activité physique pour toutes ?

Cette table ronde aura lieu le mardi 21 mai 2013 au Village V.I.P des Internationaux de Strasbourg, à proximité du Parlement européen, à partir de 15h30.
Elle réunira six intervenants, aux expertises complémentaires :

• Sophie Auconie, Eurodéputée et co-présidente du groupe « Les Amis du sport au Parlement européen »
• Rosarita Cuccoli, Présidente de Stadio Novo, Présidente du réseau européen « Femmes et Sport » créé et animée par le think tank Sport et Citoyenneté, Administratrice de Sport et Citoyenneté
• Françoise Bey, Adjointe au maire de Strasbourg
• Carole Bretteville, Représentante du CNOSF auprès du réseau European Women and Sport, Membre du réseau « Femmes et Sport » de Sport et Citoyenneté
• Yvette Palatino, 1ère femme diplômée d’Etat en boxe anglaise en France et en Europe
• Jacques Cortie, Rédacteur en chef de Sportiva-infos

Plus d’informations

The European Voice has just published my opinion piece on the legal actions taken against the European Medicines Agency.
It’s behind a paywall but you can read it here.

Un colloque international  sur le thème de la discrimination dans le cadre sportif et scolaire, intitulé : “Les discriminations, le sport et l’école en question” se tiendra le 16 mai à l’Université de Rennes 2 en partenariat média avec SportetCitoyenneté. Ce colloque est co-organisé par le laboratoire Violence,Identité,Politique et Sport (VIPS) et les étudiants de Master 1 “Sport et Sciences Sociales: Administration,Territoire,Intégration” (SSSATI) de l’UFR STAPS.

Ce colloque permettra d’alimenter 4 axes clés de ce sujet :

1. La discrimination comme concept politique et scientifique

2. L’expérience de la discrimination

3. Les processus de régulation de la discrimination

4. Le coût social des discriminations

Des chercheurs et professionnels travaillant ou étant confrontés au processus de la discrimination au sein de l’école ou du milieu sportif débattront et travailleront sur la base d’échanges autour d’ateliers, tables rondes ou encore sessions plénières permettant d’exposer leurs travaux ou leur vécu mais également d’entreprendre un débat avec l’ensemble des participants.

Cette journée aura lieu de 8h à 22h organisée autour de ces grands thèmes.

Le programme est consultable ici.

Like AbbVie, described in my last post, a second American company, InterMune, has taken legal action to prevent or restrict the European Medicines Agency from disclosing certain clinical trial data after a medicine is approved for marketing.

On 4th March a federal appeals court upheld the conviction of the former chief executive of InterMune, W. Scott Harkonen, relating to the dissemination of false and misleading statements about the results of a clinical trial of the medicine Actimmune. (Mr Harkonen may launch further appeals.)

According to an earlier statement from the FBI:
“Evidence at trial further showed that Harkonen caused InterMune to issue a false and misleading press release publicly announcing the results of a clinical trial of Actimmune for the treatment of IPF on Aug. 28, 2002. Although the clinical trial had failed, InterMune’s press release falsely stated that the results of the clinical trial established that Actimmune helped IPF patients live longer. The headline of the press release read, “InterMune Announces Phase III Data Demonstrating Survival Benefit of Actimmune in IPF,” with the subheading “Reduces Mortality by 70% in Patients with Mild to Moderate Disease.”

In 2006, the company itself had reached a Deferred Prosecution Agreement with the Department of Justice and agreed to paid fines and penalties of $36 million. One clause in the agreement states that it “does not provide any protection to any former employee of InterMune”. Mr Harkonen had left the company in 2003.

Actimmune was promoted as treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a rare but fatal disease. Treatment cost around $50,000 per annum, generating revenue of over $100 million, mostly for treatment of IPF. (Doctors may prescribe but companies may not promote medicines for uses for which they have not received an authorisation. )

In so far as the offending press release had a basis it seems to have come from the selective use of the data from a clinical trial labelled GIPF-001 – a practice sometimes known as data mining or data dredging. From the beginning, there were some sceptical voices about the company’s claims and in January 2004 an article in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that Actimmune “did not affect progression-free survival, pulmonary function, or the quality of life”.

Another case for timely and full disclosure.

On the indictment of Mr Harkonen, Intermune issued a press release, of which this is an extract:
“Since 2004, InterMune has been a transformed company with a new management team, a rigorous compliance program and a promising pipeline focused on serious pulmonary and hepatic diseases.”

Still, it’s a pity that the earlier experiences of InterMune and AbbVie/Abbott have not convinced them of the merits of more transparency on the part of the European Medicines Agency… END

Two American pharmaceutical companies, AbbVie and Intermune, have taken legal action to prevent or restrict the European Medicines Agency from disclosing certain clinical trial data after a medicine is approved for marketing.

In my opinion, both companies have been involved in activities that seem to prove the need for more transparency and not less.

AbbVie is a new company founded to carry on the work of most of the former medicines division of Abbott Laboratories. This was not a third party takeover, but a split of one company into two separate entities. AbbVie is basically the old medicines division of Abbott and therefore inherited the Corporate Integrity Agreement signed between Abbott and the US Government last October.

In October 2012, Abbott was required to pay $1.5 billion in criminal fines and civil settlements for promoting a medicine, Depakote, to treat dementia and schizophrenia. The medicine was not authorised for these indications.

According to the US Dept of Justice:
“Abbott has pleaded guilty to misbranding Depakote by promoting the drug to control agitation and aggression in elderly dementia patients and to treat schizophrenia when neither of these uses was FDA approved. In an agreed statement of facts filed in the criminal action, Abbott admits that from 1998 through 2006, the company maintained a specialized sales force trained to market Depakote in nursing homes for the control of agitation and aggression in elderly dementia patients, despite the absence of credible scientific evidence that Depakote was safe and effective for that use. In addition, from 2001 through 2006, the company marketed Depakote in combination with atypical antipsychotic drugs to treat schizophrenia, even after its clinical trials failed to demonstrate that adding Depakote was any more effective than an atypical antipsychotic alone for that use”.

According to the Agreed Statementof Facts, Abbott delayed for years in disclosing the full results of clinical trials showing that Depakote was no more effective than a placebo, and aggressively promoted Depakote through its sales force, special “educational” material, speakers fees, and selective use of study results.

For schizophrenia, Abbott submitted to the FDA in January 2002 the results of a trial described as “negative” by the company itself. (This was a trial of Depakote combined with another medicine.) Patients showed some improvement up to 21 days, but not up to 28 days – the primary “endpoint” of the study. However, Abbott used the 21 day results, the “secondary endpoints to promote Depakote to health care providers as a treatment for schizophrenia” at least up to 2006. The promotion was expensive and intensive and is described in the Agreed Statement.

Abbott carried out a second study on Depakote and had concluded by January 2005 that the results were negative. However, they continued for a very long time to use the first study in their promotion and did not disclose, even to their own reps, the results of the second study. In August 2006 they published a synopsis of the second study, which spoke of the Depakote combination as being “well tolerated”. It did not mention that patients treated with Depakote were more than twice as likely to suffer from “somnolence” than those treated with the alternative.

If the company had made a full and timely disclosure of their clinical trial results in this case they could not have continued to misbrand this medicine for as long as they did.

I will say something, also interesting, about the other company, InterMune, in a later post. END

Euractiv has a piece on the clinical trials proposal that has attracted a number of comments – including one from me.

It would be great if more people joined in – on any side of the question.

Here is the link

The Football We Love” ?, est le premier salon consacré uniquement au potentiel social et éducatif du football . Le think tank Sport et Citoyenneté a en chargé l’organisation de trois tables rondes, qui auront lieu les 16-17-18 Mai prochain à Bruxelles :

• le football : une entrée éducative innovante pour promouvoir la tolérance chez les jeunes?
• le football, un outil d’intégration et d’égalité sociale ?
• la tolérance dans le football : un cap à garder dans la lutte contre le racisme

Comme l’évoque Lilan Thuram, champion du monde et parrain de The Football We Love “Le football ne porte que les valeurs qu’on lui donne”. Des visites surprises de Lilian Thuram, Emmanuel Petit, Marco Bode, Mbo Mpenza, Marc Wilmots et autres (ex) joueurs de footballk Des fondations de (ex) joueurs et de clubs belges et européens auront lieu tout au long du salon.

“The Football We Love” souhaite rassembler en toute simplicité, comme une partie de foot sur une place de village, il est à l’image de notre société et se conjugue avec les mots : ensemble, ouvert, respect, responsabilité et éducation.“The Football We Love” ose croire dans un football moteur d’engagement, d’émancipation et de changement social. Il est ainsi la première plateforme conçue à la fois pour des intervenants, belges et internationaux qui insistent sur l’ajout de valeurs positives dans l’organisation générale du football.

Ce salon réunit concrètement 40 stands présentant des organisations liées au football, des fondations et des associations susceptibles d’entamer des collaborations entre elles, des ateliers Fair Play animés par le Panathlon, des conférences orientées autour du rôle social du football et animées par le Think Tank “Sport et Citoyenneté”, une exposition One Hundred : 100 objets exclusifs possédant chacun une incroyable histoire! Pourquoi le maillot du “Havre” est-il bleu clair et bleu foncé ? Pourquoi trouve t’on les drapeaux turc et allemand sur les chaussures de Ekici ?…, des exposition photos de Henk Cortier : partout à travers le monde, le football rassemble dans les quartiers, dans les villes, entre les pays, les continents. Le football « est » le monde ; le football nous aide à partager nos différences, Animations football Freestyle et tournoi “Street Heroes”, comme dans les quartiers…

L’inauguration officielle aura lieu le mercredi 15 mai 2013 (18h)  et l’ouverture au grand public du jeudi 16 mai au dimanche 19 mai 2013, de 14h à 19h aux Caves (Les Abattoirs d’Anderlecht). Accès gratuit.

Plus d’informations