Petrelis Files

March 18, 2005

Catherine Mathis
The New York Times
Corporate Communication

Dear Ms. Mathis:

Today's Times has a story by Marc Santora about an article published in The Lancet this week about the mutant strain of HIV in New York City. (Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/18/nyregion.html)

Mr. Santora reports: "The study, appearing in The Lancet, a medical journal, shows the virus to be resistant to nearly all licensed drugs and particularly aggressive. Most of the study's details were disclosed earlier during an AIDS conference in Boston. The report is based on the work of a team of researchers from the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in Manhattan led by Dr. David D. Ho and Dr. Martin Markowitz."

That is all true, except the Times failed to include the following vital transparency information about the researchers, which appears at the end of The Lancet article.

"Conflict of interest statement: D D Ho has been a paid adviser to ViroLogic since its inception in 1995, and has a brother who is an employee at the company. T Wrin, N Parking, and C Petropoulos are ViroLogic employees who hold stocks or stock options in the company. No other co-author has a conflict of interest." (Source: http://thelancet.com/journal/vol365/, page 1037.)

As you'll recall, on February 21 the Times reported "Dr. Ho said that he has disclosed all of his ties to the company and that any suggestion of impropriety was false."

While this sentence is a small step toward transparency, it did not fully inform readers about Ho's _paid_ advisory role to ViroLogic, the company that owns the AIDS drug resistance test used to determine the New York City patient has a mutant strain of HIV.

I am requesting that the Times run an editor's note informing readers of what The Lancet included in its article, specifically, that Dr. David Ho has been a paid consultant to ViroLogic for a decade.

A prompt reply is requested and appreciated.

Regards,
Michael Petrelis
San Francisco, CA