Chief medical officer rows back on Alzheimer’s claim

A SENIOR government adviser has backtracked over claims she tried to cover up a controversial Alzheimer’s study and insisted she was attempting to prevent a public health scandal.

Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer at the Department of Health, has disclosed that she approached the editor of the scientific journal The Lancet to discuss a study which suggested that the disease might be infectious, before it was published.

The study, issued this month, suggested the “seeds” of Alzheimer’s disease may be transmitted from one person to another during certain medical procedures. It was based on the brain autopsies of eight people who had died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease after receiving injections of human growth hormone from the pituitary glands of dead people.

On Wednesday, it was alleged that Dame Sally told Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, the study was likely to result in a public reaction, and she wanted him to give her advice on how to handle the story when it emerged.

In an unsigned editorial in The Lancet this week, Dr Horton wrote that an unnamed government source informed him of the study’s impending publication. Dame Sally has responded to a Freedom of Information request to the Department of Health seeking to establish the identity of the source, to confirm she spoke to him at a “chance meeting”.

In an open letter to science correspondents, she said: “It is my duty to raise concerns about possible misreporting of health issues that might cause public alarm.” She also wanted to make clear “it is not possible to ‘catch’ Alzheimer’s disease”.

She said her conversation was to “protect the interests of legitimate research and ensure that the conclusions of research are reported fairly”.

A Department of Health spokesman said: “The chief medical officer raised concerns about the potential for misreporting of the research, not the research itself.”