Regret the Error

A Jan. 26 Business article on potential nominees for head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission said researchers Gail Charnley and Jacqueline Patterson wrote a letter to a technical journal about a study that they had co-authored without disclosing that the study had been funded partly by pesticide makers. However, the authors disclosed their funding when the original article was published in 2003 in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology. Then in 2004, Charnley and Patterson wrote a separate letter to the editor of a different journal, Environmental Health Perspectives, responding to critics of the original article. In their first draft of the 2004 letter to the editor, the researchers said that they had no financial conflict of interest because they were no longer receiving any funding from the pesticide industry. The editor of the journal suggested that because the letter related to their previous article, which had been partially funded by industry, they should disclose the previous funding again. The authors agreed, and the 2004 letter to the editor ran with the following disclosure above their signatures: “The article by Charnley and Patterson (2003) was partially supported by the pesticide industry, which wanted an independent review of its studies. Because they did not receive payment for writing this letter, the authors declare they have no competing financial interests.” Link