Media distorts drugs reporting

Television and newspaper reports tend to exaggerate the benefits of new medicines while ignoring their risks and costs.

A study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, reveals that information on drugs presented by the mass media is often incomplete and can be misleading.

Stephen Soumerai, co-author and professor of ambulatory care and prevention at the Harvard Medical School, said: "The media are a very important source of public health information but stories on new drugs can be misleading when they fail to address potential conflicts of interest and don't discuss both relative and absolute benefits, risks and costs."

The experts randomly selected 207 stories from US newspapers and television between 1994 and 1998 about three new medications.

They found that 40 per cent cited opinion from scientists with financial ties with the drug in question without this potential conflict of interest being declared.

Forty per cent did not contain a numerical analysis of the drug's benefits and of those that did, 83 per cent only reported relative rather than absolute benefits.

More than half of the stories did not mention potential adverse effects known to be associated with the medications and 70 per cent did not mention cost effectiveness.

The study concludes that reporting procedures needed to be improved if the public were to make informed judgements.

Steve Farrar