Conflict of interest is not just about advising pharmaceutical companies.

that we have adopted a disclosure policy for authors within the last year, following a related change in the policy of the British Association of Psychopharmacology (BAP) for members of Council. We are glad that we did. Disclosure is strongly preferable to concealment. When we drafted the BAP disclosure guidelines, we included conflicts of interest that might result from relationships to a voluntary organization, a charity, a law firm, a department of government, an investment company or any other formally constituted body with interests in the field of psychopharmacology. In other words, we sought to alert members to relationships, which were not invariably the result of scientific or educational cooperation with the pharmaceutical industry. Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, recently announced that just such a conflict of interest existed in relation to Dr Andrew Wakefield’s initial publication on a syndrome of bowel disease and autism tentatively linked to the MMR vaccine (Horton, 2004). It will be recalled that his work has led to a media fuelled ‘controversy’ and, in practice, falling immunization rates that make a lethal epidemic of measles increasingly likely. Horton went on to state: