all of my favorite missions were ill-defined

Healthy Skepticism is an international association of doctors who work to stop harmful and misleading drug promotion. They started out in the 80s, doing letter-writing campaigns to stop some really hideous drug misuses like the prescription of anabolic steroids to malnourished children. But they were so effective at threatening pharmaceutical companies that most of the really audacious examples got taken care of in the first decade of the campaign.

Now they work on less dramatic (but still harmful) things like the overprescription of antidepressants or the unintented bias towards new drugs for the sake of their newness. They do lobbying instead of letter-writing because those things are just harder to get people all frothed up about.

But I happen to think there is still some low-hanging fruit out there.

Yesterday night my neighbor gave me some Dettol (made by the British Reckitt Bneckiser) to take care of an infected wound.  THe label says, (among other things) this:

“Proven to fight against germs such a:

Herpes 2

HIV

[Blah blah blah]”

The HIV rate around here is something like 5%. That strikes me as pretty murderous information. In that vein:

Dear Reckitt Benckiser,

Please stop marketing your cleaning products as cures for AIDS.

and:

Dear Healthy Skepticism,

Please use your knowledge and influence to stick it to them.