3 thoughts on “Fish-oil on trial”

1. There is one thing that really concerns me about this piece of experimentation. I’m a health researcher. If I want to do research involving either adults on children, I need to get full ethical clearance from an ethics committee. In the past, when I have been involved in research involving children in schools, it has had to have explicit ethical approval from the ethics committee of the relevant education department, and also by a separate University ethics committee. This is as it should be. If I didn’t do this, I would probably be severly disciplined and possibly lose my job. It would also be in violation of the Delaration of Helsinki, which among other things covers medical experimentation – which giving children fishy tablets surely is – whether or not it is physicians giving out the pills. In any case the Declaration also covers human experiments (like htis one) conducted by non-medics. But here we have experimenters doling out drugs to children, apparently with the blessing of the council, head teachers and so on. So the key questions are: 1) what ethics committee, if any, agreed to this study, and if they did, can we see the minutes of the relevant meeting; and 2) if this was not passed by any ethics committee, why were the experimenters allowed to conduct medical experiments (whether methodically rigorous or not) on schoolchildren? Or have I missed something…

2. Evidencekagoul – excellent comment and I couldn’t agree more.

   It is shocking that a council is prepared to use public funds for this sort of “experiment” – especially as you point out, with a total lack of oversight. It is equally bad if the funds were just for a commercial trial – do we really think so little of our children…?

   In a nutshell, I can only think that the council thought it would be OK because they, like most people, are aware that all this nutritionist nonsense is pure hokum and this was just a large placebo group…

   (Sadly, the cynic in me realises they probably don’t think this)

3. Pingback: Fishoil Scam hits news eventually » Why Dont You Blog?

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