Spanish drug editor wins case brought by Merck, Sharp & Dohme

A victory for all independent drug bulletins was declared last week when Professor Joan-Ramon Laporte, the editor of Spain's Butlletí Groc, won a district court case brought against it by the pharmaceutical company Merck, Sharp & Dohme.

The multinational firm had sued the editor and the publisher of the bulletin, the Catalan Institute of Pharmacology, over an article that the bulletin had published in 2002. The company said that the article had contained false and inaccurate information about the trial of one of its drugs, the Vioxx gastrointestinal outcomes research (VIGOR) trial, which looked at the safety of its arthritis drug, rofecoxib (24 January, p 188). …