Vet School relies on external funding

While Lisa Ohman was preparing to start classes at the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine, Hill’s Pet Nutrition was sending her e-mails about being their campus representative.

The third-year veterinary student now makes $9 an hour and gets free dog food to tell her peers about the company’s products.

Ohman, who sees faculty members feeding Hill’s to their own pets, said she’ll probably recommend it to her clients when she enters the practice.

Such programs are not uncommon. The College of Veterinary Medicine received more than $5.4 million in the previous fiscal year from industry sponsors, including Hill’s, Purina, Royal Canin, Iams and Bil-Jac.

The partnerships come in a variety of forms, including scholarships, program and event sponsorships, product seminars and luncheons and donated food, vaccines, medications and equipment.

“If we didn’t have those partnerships, that funding, we would have to cut some of the programming,” Laura Molgaard, the college’s associate dean for academic and student affairs, said. “We rely on them in order to provide some of the programming we give to our students.”

‘A different playing field’

Human and veterinary medicine are different animals, so it’s no wonder they interact differently with the private sector, some experts say.

Trevor Ames, dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine, said government entities provide significant funding to medical schools. By contrast, the veterinary profession is largely owner-funded, as clients decide what they do with their animals.

“There’s not this issue of government funding health care for our animals,” he said.

There’s simply a lot more money at stake when it comes to human medicine, said Marguerite Pappaioanou, executive director of the Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges.

“They’re on a whole different playing field,” she said. “Because of the huge amount of money on the human side, it has attracted congressional attention. It’s very public and very visible.”

Veterinarians make an average of $89,450 a year, compared to the $165,000 physicians and surgeons make, according to 2008 data gathered by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

With decreasing state support, the school is increasingly reliant on companies to support its programming, Molgaard said.

That’s similar to what’s happening at the Iowa State University College of Veterinary Medicine.

“We definitely depend on our sponsors,” said Bianca Zaffarano, a clinician in the college’s Veterinary Medical Center.

Veterinarians can still choose which products they use, unlike in human medicine where doctors are sometimes bound to prescribing the drugs of their corporate sponsors, Zaffarano said.

“We aren’t their handmaidens,” she said. “There’s still freedom in veterinary medicine to do the right thing for the animals, no matter where the product comes from.”

Contact with the companies teaches students to be critical of marketing, a skill that’s vital when they get into the practice, Molgaard said.

“They need to learn how to make those decisions based on information as students so that later they can make them without blindly following the marketing of those companies,” she said. “We want them to be informed consumers and informed providers.”

It’d be difficult for a company to provide false or misleading information about their product, as the faculty analyzes claims and looks into possible side effects, Ames said.

“There’s a creed in medicine of ‘do no harm,’ ” he said. “You always want to make sure you know as much as possible about the products you’re using.”

Change on the horizon

Early in his career, veterinarian and small animal cardiologist Paul D. Pion discovered commercial pet food — primarily Hill’s — was causing a deadly heart disease in cats.

“It was thought to be the best food of the day,” he said. “People were shocked.”

His discovery, published in the August 1987 issue of Science, taught Pion to look deeper into the information companies provide.

“It’s what you don’t know that’s more dangerous than what you know,” he said.

Now, the president and co-founder of the Veterinary Information Network — which stopped accepting corporate sponsorship over five years ago — said it’s impossible for people, however well-intentioned, to separate their ties to industries that support them when they make decisions.

He said he would rather see veterinary schools cut their programs than take money from industries to support them.

“They’re hard-up for money, and they’re bending their ethics,” he said.

The sea change that’s been happening in human medicine is slowly gaining steam in veterinary medicine, Pappaioanou said.

“We’re not too far behind in terms of getting good ethnical guidelines together,” she said.

More and more veterinary colleges are starting to look at their industry sponsors with a critical eye and are developing conflict of interest policies, she said.

“They’re taking it very seriously,” she said.

The AAVMC is working on a conflict of interest policy. Although they have no control over what colleges choose to do, the policy will apply to their own company sponsorships.

It’s too early to know how or whether the upcoming University-wide conflict of interest policy will affect the veterinary college when it’s released, Ames said.

While it’s understandable that people worry about corporate influence in the veterinary school, the important thing is to teach students to mange relationships and avoid conflicts of interest, Molgaard said.

“Those conflicts will be available for them their whole careers,” she said. “We can’t shelter them here and then throw them out into the real world and expect them to know how to make appropriate, evidence-based decisions.”