User:Miguelito Vieira/Draft for COI Eflornithine

Conflict of interest
I believe there is conflict of interest in Tdaguy's edits here, and I invite everyone to carefully review and improve the content he added here that. Please read below.

My last edits on this article included info on the stopping of the production of the sleeping sickness medicine on 1995. While preparing them, I found out that this info was present on earlier versions, and was deleted (while a lot of content on the hirsutism application and its commercial drug was added). In fact, in those earlier versions the article had much more content related to this drug's application to sleeping sickness (an endemic disease, and invariably lethal when not treated) than its application to hirsutism (i.e. hairiness in woman; not a disease, but a symptom of cosmetic concern, and therefore of lesser importance than sleeping sickness, which is an endemic and fatal disease).

Those changes happened in a block, and were all made by Tdaguy. A good example is this one, in which the heading "Production" was removed, leaving the reader to believe that the drug has always been available for sufferers of sleeping sickness. Also, a previous edit by the same user included information on Aventis' partnership with WHO (Aventis donated eflornithine-based sleeping sickness medicines), but without mentioning that this partnership only happened after public outcry (because of the launching of Varniqa — the version of the drug that only treats hirsutism — while the sleeping sickness formulation was out of production), as reported by Médecins Sans Frontières.

I believe this goes strongly against the neutral point of view Wikipedia policy. Now, let me explain why I believe there is also conflict of interest in this case.

The user in question, Tdaguy, edited 3 articles: this one, The Duffy Agency (which it created) and Niquitin (which it also created). If you google Varniqa + "Duffy Agency", the second link you get is for a weblog entry, by a webdesigner based in Malmö (the same city as The Duffy Agency's headquarters), in which we learn that an ad agency called The Duffy Agency was responsible for launching a new UK website for Varniqa. The post was made almost exactly a month before Tdaguy's edits on this article. The Duffy Agency's website also says that among the company's services are "social media campaigns" and "social media strategy".

Also, Tdaguy's username appears to be an acronym to "The Duffy Agency guy"; the same username also appears at this user profile elsewhere, which is directly linked to the company's official website and has its logo as an avatar. I believe this is reason enough to believe that Tdaguy is connected to The Duffy Agency, and that — because they have done marketing campaigns for Varniqa, and roughly during the same period as these edits — it has conflict of interest with this article.

Now, how should we proceed with this article? It seems that Tdaguy's edits added some content that was missing here (earlier articles only stated that Eflornithine had many uses, but didn't mention hirsutism explicitly), so it might not be the case to simply revert those edits. But it's also clear they shifted the article's focus to hirsutism (this edit of his is a good example), which is a less important issue than sleeping sickness; and made it non-NPOV, by simply removing the production section. I also have to admit that I'm distrustful of the content added, because of the conflict of interest mentioned.

Because of that, I believe the best option would be to carefully review all the content Tdaguy has introduced here, especially when unsourced, or when sources are the pharmaceutical companies producing Varniqa and similar medicines. What do you say? —Miguelito Vieira (talk) 12:36, 11 June 2010 (UTC)