Abstract
The Erice Declaration on Communicating Drug Safety Information, first published in September 1997, provides a vision of vigorous, open, ethical, patient-centred communications in drug safety that the world has yet to achieve. The Declaration is reprinted here as a further stimulus to all parties to renew their commitment and to add new momentum to the improvements which have undoubtedly taken place in the past few years. The content of the Declaration is briefly reviewed, and some of the continuing communications challenges and problems are outlined.
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Acknowledgements
Bruce Hugman is a consultant in communications to the Uppsala Monitoring Centre, and was one of the organising team for the 1997 Erice meeting. Professor I. Ralph Edwards and Professor Giampaolo Velo share the views expressed by Bruce Hugman in this article.
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Appendix
Appendix
Erice is a pre-medieval town, perched on a lofty mountain at the western tip of Sicily. Its most outstanding institution is the Ettore Majorana Centre for Scientific Culture, which has 113 Schools that cover all branches of science. From time to time, this unusual academy brings together groups of distinguished scientists and thinkers from all over the world to think, talk, share their knowledge and research, and to debate future agendas and strategies in their specialty.
It was here, under the auspices of the International School of Pharmacology, that The Erice Declaration on Communicating Drug Safety Information was debated and written. In May 2002, there was a second meeting addressing the problematic issue of direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of drugs. This second workshop, Drug Advertising and Consumers, was organised by the Verona Reference Centre for Education and Communication within the WHO Programme for International Drug Monitoring. This reached an impasse as a result of the irreconcilable, well argued and passionately felt positions of those who wanted cautious, regulated liberalistion, and of those who were implacably opposed to any kind of DTC. The Erice Statement on Drug Advertising to the Consumer is available from URL: http://www.sfm.univr.it.
In 2006, depending on the availability of funding, it is hoped to have a third meeting with the emerging priority of patient safety and its relationship with pharmacovigilance as its topic.
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Hugman, B. The Erice Declaration. Drug-Safety 29, 91–93 (2006). https://doi.org/10.2165/00002018-200629010-00007
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.2165/00002018-200629010-00007