Several drug companies have now been caught deleting important information from Wikipedia, in order to downplay the risk of their drugs

Wikipedia has developed a reputation as a semi-reliable onlineencyclopedia, and in general, it is not too bad with non-controversial material. But since anyone can edit Wikipedia, some controversial subjects have been subject to continual re-edits. And some companies have been acting to remove items that would be bad PR for the company, even if true. From the Brand Week NRX weblog

The first drug company caught messing with the Wikipedia was AstraZeneca. References to claims that Seroquel allegedly made teenagers “more likely to think about harming or killing themselves” were deleted by a user of a computer registered to the drug company, according to Times.

According to Patients not Patents, now it is Abbott Laboratories who've been caught doing the same thing. The group alleges that "employees of Abbott Laboratories have been altering entries to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, to eliminate information questioning the safety of its top-selling drugs."

The tool used to catch these corporate erasers is the WikiScanner, which was developed by Virgil Griffith, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology, and it reveals changes to the online encyclopaedia by linking edits back to the computers from which they were done, using each computer’s unique IP address. The scanner has wreaked havoc in news media, politics and among corporations caught redhanded "improving" articles.

Patients not Patents found that in July of 2007, a computer at Abbott Laboratories’ Chicago office was used to delete a reference to a Mayo Clinic study that revealed that patients taking the arthritis drug Humira faced triple the risk of developing certain kinds of cancers and twice the risk of developing serious infections. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2006.

The same computer was used to remove articles describing public interest groups’ attempt to have Abbott’s weight-loss drug Meridia banned after the drug was found to increase the risk of heart attack and stroke in some patients.

The site’s editors restored the deleted information, but Patients not Patents claim that Abbott’s activities illustrate drug companies’ eagerness to suppress safety concerns.

Jeffrey Light, Executive Director of the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group said, “The argument that drug companies can be trusted to provide adequate safety information on their own products has been used by the pharmaceutical industry to fight against government regulation of consumer advertising. Clearly such trust is misplaced. As Abbott’s actions have demonstrated, drug companies will attempt to hide unfavorable safety information when they think nobody is watching.”