Who Really Chooses Our CE? Corporate influence on veterinary conferences (#465)

Every year, tens of thousands of veterinarians file into convention centers, hotel ballrooms, and exhibition halls to fulfill their CE requirements.

We trust that what we hear in those rooms is guided by science, not sales.

We assume that topics are chosen because they’re important for animal health, and that speakers are selected for their expertise, not for their logo affiliations.

But here’s the uncomfortable surprise I ran into when I went looking for hard data on this topic:

There is almost no published research that measures how corporate input has changed veterinary-conference content or lecturer selection over time.

Not very little. Not limited evidence. Essentially, none in the last five years.

Given how much we rely on conference CE to shape our clinical decisions, that absence is itself a story worth telling.

The study that doesn’t exist (but should)

I went searching for exactly the kind of paper you’d expect to find by now:

• Trends in Industry-Sponsored Content at Major Veterinary Conferences, 2005–2025.

• Corporate Influence on Topic and Speaker Selection in Veterinary Continuing Education.

  
  

• Changes in Proportion of Industry-Supported CE Across Specialty and General Meetings.

  
  

Nothing.

What we do have are:

• Papers on CE/CPD accreditation that acknowledge concerns about commercial influence and try to build firewalls against it.

• Surveys of how much CE vets do, the formats they prefer, and their perceptions of value.

• Journalistic investigations, mostly older, noting that pharmaceutical companies often suggest topics and speakers for CE.

These are useful, but they don’t answer the question:

How much of our conference content is now structured, sponsored, or subtly shaped by industry, and how has that changed over time?

No one appears to have done the basic counting.

What the literature does tell us

One of the clearest recent signals comes from work on CE accreditation.

A 2023 article on veterinary CE in Europe openly notes that the explosion of CE offerings has created a potentially lucrative niche and raises concern about undue commercial influence by the pharmaceutical industry and other operators in veterinary medicine.

 Accreditation bodies now explicitly require things like:

• Transparent provider and instructor qualifications.

• Evidence-based content.

• Independence from inappropriate commercial influence.

In other words, the policies assume the risk is real and growing.

You don’t build firewalls unless you’re worried about the fire.

But again, these are principles and criteria. They don’t tell us what’s happening inside the average conference program. They don’t show us whether industry-sponsored content has gone from 5% to 25% of CE over the last decade. They don’t map who actually sits at the table when topics and faculty are chosen.

The evidence gap remains.

So, we turn to the programs themselves.

If the peer-reviewed literature won’t give us numbers, the next best place is the public conference materials: schedules, sponsor prospectuses, and session descriptions.

When you look there, a pattern appears.

VMX: the flagship mega-meeting

VMX in Orlando bills itself as the world’s premier veterinary meeting. The scale alone is striking: well over a thousand hours of CE, tens of thousands of attendees, and hundreds of animal-health companies in the expo hall.

The official materials make it clear that exhibitors and sponsors don’t just sit behind their booths. They:

• Sponsor or present educational sessions.

  
  

• Host labelled Industry Breakfasts and Industry Lunches on topics closely aligned with their product portfolios.

Recent VMX programs have offered lunch-and-learn or breakfast CE on JAK inhibitors for pruritus and allergy, multimodal mobility and osteoarthritis management, tapeworm control in dogs and cats, feline hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, and advanced imaging and diagnostics.

Each of these is a single-sponsor event, branded with a company name and logo, but scheduled as an integrated part of the CE program.

Even the big wow moments carry a sponsor tag: a high-profile keynote session with a Hollywood celebrity was recently billed as sponsored by a major pharmaceutical company.

We still don’t know what fraction of VMX’s total CE hours these industry sessions represent. But we can say this:

VMX is structurally designed so that companies can buy branded CE slots, choose product-adjacent topics, and put their own speakers at the microphone.

MEAVC 2025 – a rare numeric snapshot

The Middle East & Africa Veterinary Congress (MEAVC) in Dubai is unusually transparent about its numbers. For 2025, it lists: 42+ speakers, 5 workshops, 4 wet labs, 74 Master Classes & Lectures, and 6 Industry Sessions.

If we focus just on lecture-style content:

• Total lecture-type sessions = 74 (master classes/lectures) + 6 (industry sessions) ≈ 80 hours.

  
  

• Six out of eighty hours, or about 7–8%, are formally designated industry sessions.

Promotional material describes these as being led by major pharmaceutical, nutrition, and equipment brands, designed to showcase What’s New from industry experts.

No one is pretending this slice is independent or sponsor neutral. It’s a carved-out, branded portion of the program.

Is 7–8% a lot? A little? A slippery slope?

We don’t know, because we have no baseline data from 10 or 20 years ago. But it does give us a concrete number for one modern meeting.

ACVIM Forum – industry tracks with a price tag

The ACVIM Forum, a flagship specialty congress, is perhaps even clearer.

In recent years, the ACVIM Forum has featured Industry Session breakfasts and lunches on new therapies for pancreatitis, immune checkpoint therapies in oncology, chronic kidney disease management, clinical trials as opportunities for pets and practices, and zoonotic and emerging infectious disease surveillance.

These are RACE-accredited CE sessions on clinically important topics, but each one is:

• Sponsored by a single company.

• Branded with that company’s identity.

• Framed around disease areas where the sponsor has a strong commercial interest.

Then you look at the sponsor prospectus. One recent prospectus simply lists:

Industry Sessions – $5,500 | 8 available.

In other words:

• There are eight purchasable Industry Session slots.

• Each slot buys a company a seat at the educational table: their topic, their key opinion leaders, their brand.

  
  

Again, we don’t know what fraction of total CE hours these eight sessions represent. But we can say that ACVIM now has a defined, priced, channel through which companies can move their content and their speakers into the program.

WSAVA and regional meetings – the template spreads

The World Small Animal Veterinary Association (WSAVA) world congress uses slightly different language, but the structure is similar.

Recent congress information has included:

• A separate Industry Sessions Timetable.

• An Industry Symposia Manual for sponsors.

• Practical workshops explicitly labelled as sponsored by specific companies.

Regional conferences are following suit. Programs for smaller European and national meetings often list industry sessions alongside oral abstracts and workshops as a standard track type.

The idea of the industry session is no longer an oddity; it’s become normalized conference architecture.

What none of this tells us

All these examples are useful, but they share two limitations:

• They’re snapshots, not trends.

• We see what a program looks like in 2022 or 2025, but we have no systematic comparison with 2005 or 2010. Are we looking at a minor tweak or a major shift over time? We don’t know.

• They don’t reveal the decision-making.

• Programs tell us that Industry Sessions exist, that they can be purchased, and that they’re linked to specific sponsors.

• They do not tell us:

• Who proposed the topics.

• Who chose the speakers.

• Whether program committees ever declined sponsor-suggested themes.

• How much quiet pressure is felt by organizers whose meetings depend on sponsor money to break even.

So, we’re still left with inference and anecdote.

We can say: there are clearly pathways for companies to put their content into the program.

But we cannot say: X% of the overall program is now industry-driven, and that’s Y-fold higher than a decade ago.

For a profession that prides itself on evidence-based medicine, that blind spot ought to bother us.

What a proper study would look like

If someone wanted to close this evidence gap, a robust study is entirely doable. It’s not neurosurgery; it’s content analysis and transparency. For example:

1.      Sample the conferences

• Choose a mix of major and regional meetings (VMX, ACVIM, AVMA, WSAVA, regional fora) at three time points: say 2005, 2015, 2025.

2.      Code every session

• For each session, record:

  
  

  • Topic area.

• Session type (plenary, scientific, workshop, lunch-and-learn, in-booth CE, industry session, etc.).

• Funding status (sponsored vs unsponsored vs unclear).

• Sponsor identity (pharma, nutrition, corporate hospital group, diagnostics, other).

• Declared conflicts of interest for speakers (if listed).

3.      Analyze the trends

• Proportion of total CE hours that are industry-sponsored over time

• Changes in topic distribution (e.g., growth in sessions aligned with high-margin therapeutics or diagnostics).

• Concentration of sponsors (are most industry sessions funded by a handful of companies?).

• Shifts in the presence of corporate hospital groups as sponsors and content providers.

4.      Add a qualitative layer

• Interviews with program committee members about how topics and speakers are chosen.

• How sponsor input is handled in practice, not just on paper.

• Examples where sponsor requests were accepted, modified, or declined.

Within a year, we could have a reasonably clear, data-driven map of how much corporate content exists, how that has changed, and where the pressure points lie.

Right now, we don’t.

Why this matters

Some colleagues shrug and say, So what? I can listen to an industry lunch talk and filter the sales pitch. Maybe you can. Many of us genuinely value hearing directly from the people who know their products best.

But this isn’t just about individual critical thinking. It’s about agenda-setting:

• Which diseases get whole tracks and which get squeezed into a single early-morning slot?

• How much conference real estate is handed to expensive, branded therapies versus preventive medicine, communication, ethics, or practice ownership?

• Which career paths are showcased: independent general practice, public health, academia, or corporate consolidators and industry roles?

If conferences increasingly depend on corporate money to survive, it becomes harder to claim that these decisions are made in a vacuum, untouched by sponsorship.

And if we care about the intellectual independence of our profession, we should want to know – not guess – how that dependence is shaping what we see and hear.

Filling the gap: A call to action

At the moment, we have:

• Policies that warn against undue commercial influence.

• Programs that openly sell and schedule industry-branded sessions.

• No quantitative, longitudinal research that connects those two facts.

  
  

That’s the evidence gap.

It’s time for:

• Academic centers and professional bodies to commission independent studies of conference content and sponsorship trends.

• Conference organizers to publish simple, transparent metrics each year, such as: total CE hours offered, hours that are directly industry-sponsored, number of sessions where a sponsor proposed the topic and/or speakers, and proportion of plenary or flagship events carrying a single sponsor’s brand.

• Accreditation bodies to treat disclosure of these metrics as part of what it means to offer credible, independent CE – not an optional extra.

• Individual veterinarians to start asking basic questions when they register: How much of this program is sponsored? Are industry sessions clearly labelled and separated in the app or printed schedule? Are speaker conflicts of interest disclosed in a way that’s visible before we walk into the room?

This isn’t about demonizing industry. Most of the advances we rely on in practice came from collaborations between companies, clinicians and researchers.

This is about knowing who is in the room when our continuing education is designed and being honest about how that shapes the topics we hear, the drugs we prescribe, and the futures we imagine for our profession.

Until we have that evidence, the most accurate statement we can make is also the most unsettling:

Veterinary conferences are clearly changing under the influence of corporate sponsorship, but we can’t yet say by how much, because no one is measuring it.

That’s the gap. And it’s ours to close.

Sources on accreditation & commercial influence in CE

• Kareskoski M. Accreditation in continuing veterinary education: development of an accreditation system and selection of accreditation criteria. Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 2023. Discusses the growth of CE as a “lucrative” niche and the risk of undue commercial influence, and proposes accreditation criteria to protect educational independence. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10416105/pdf/fvets-10-1181961.pdf

• VetCEE – instructions for external evaluators. VetCEE PDF guidance explicitly states that accredited courses must be free from “undue commercial influence” and that events organised entirely by pharmaceutical or equipment companies are not eligible for accreditation. https://www.vetcee.eu/system/files/attachments/instructions_for_external_evaluators_09012023.pdf

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