ARE DRUGS companies making us think diseases are more common and more serious than they really are? A senior executive quoted in the British Medical Journal believes soâand he says itâs the marketing people who are responsible.
Fred Nadjarian, managing director of Roche Australia, says: âThe marketing people always beat [hype] these things up.â He gives the example of social phobia, a disorder Roche planned to treat with the antidepressant moclobemide in the 1990s. A media release sponsored by Roche at the time announced that more than a million Australians suffered from this âsoul destroyingâ psychiatric disorder. But Nadjarian now says social phobia cannot be that common, because when Roche tried to recruit people for clinical trials âwe just werenât able toâ.
He goes on to say that his experience with this one condition highlights a much wider problem. âIf you added up all the statistics,â he says, âwe all must have about 20 diseases. A lot of these things are blown out of all proportion.â
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The BMJ says that his comments âadd weight to fears that pharmaceuticals companies may be systematically trying to portray certain health conditions in ways that maximise their size and seriousnessâpartly to help build markets for new productsâ. Go to for the full story.
WHAT IS going on at Google? First they run an April fool story about their technology depending on pigeons (Feedback, 13 April). Now theyâve run a story about how to spell Britney Spears. Or rather, how not to. Go to and you will find a list of some 400 misspellings of the chanteuseâs name, complete with the number of times each error has been detected (and corrected) by Googleâs spellchecker. When we looked, the most popular misspellings were Brittany Spears (40,134), Brittney Spears (36,315) and Britany Spears (24,342).
The variations on the singerâs first name go on and on, and you can pick your favourites: we like Breatney, Bitny, Britnewy and Brinny. But thereâs something strange about the list that Google doesnât comment on. Nobody, it seems, spelled Spears wrong.
A RECENT BT advertising campaign promises âfree UK callsâ. To ram the point home, the adverts feature people with faces painted in the colours and patterns of the flags of the countries that make up the United Kingdom. So one advert has a man with a red cross on a white background, the flag of England, next to a man painted with the vertical green and white stripes of the flag ofâŠ
But hang on a minute. The only flag we could find on that matched this pattern was the flag of Nigeria.
ONE MORE Internet business goes down the drainâbut then gets a reprieve. This particular online concern was selling second-hand urine, and has been banned from trading by the South Carolina supreme court. Kenneth Curtis, the entrepreneur behind the business, was making a living selling his urine at $69 a time to people trying to evade drugs tests.
South Carolina Chief Justice Jean Toal was unswayed by Curtisâs argument that the law was inhibiting his freedom of expression. But Curtis has dribbled past the opposition by moving his business to North Carolina, where there is no law banning the sale or donation of urine.
NASA publishes an âAstronomy Picture of the Dayâ at The example for Monday 11 March was a photograph of the 100-metre Green Bank Telescope, about which NASA commments: âThe main dish is so large that it could house a football game, allowing it to hear even the faint murmurs of quasars located across the Universe.â
Reader John Haythorne is puzzled. Why, he wants to know, does it need to house a football game in order to hear the faint murmur of quasars? He also worries about the restricted angles at which it could be pointed while so occupied.
ACCORDING to the Ananova online news service, researchers at the University of Michigan have found the part of the brain which makes losers keep gambling. Its name? The âmug circuitâ.
IT SEEMS thereâs always somebody with a silly question to post on an electronic mailing list. Hereâs a sample from a mailing list devoted to dinosaurs: âIâm writing a story and I need to know if anyone has a psychological profile for the attitude of an adult female velociraptor?â
Answers on a postcard, please.
A RECENT article in Scotland on Sunday had this to say: âThe Forestry Commission will this week give a Highland laird ÂŁ2m to plant 2.5 million trees and create Scotlandâs largest native woodland ⊠This is not blanket afforestation, there will be no two trees in a straight line.â
How will they manage that?
SEVERAL readers have told us about a curious warning in the Virgin mobile phone usersâ guide. Among all the sensible advice comes this: âDo not put your mobile phone in a microwave oven; this may cause damage either to the oven or the phone.â
Indeed. But who would want to do such a thing anyway?
READER Tony Gough works at a doctorsâ surgery in Kent. He says they recently received a circular from a local National Health Service blood testing unit that seems to have come up with itâs own novel idea for meeting government waiting list targets. It stated that âpatients may now phone themselves for appointmentsâ.
FINALLY, even the laws of physics need a day off sometimes. A notice displayed in the Cambridge University Engineering Department recently informed students that âTodayâs Electromagnetic Fields and Waves have been cancelled, due to illness.â
