General practitioners get lots of mail

Industry relationships are claimed to be educational so it's recently been suggested that doctors attending drug company events should be publicly identified. The professor chairing the Australian Medical Association's Therapeutics Committee commented that this would be "a major tragedy". He might be supported by the 27 per cent of US medical school and major teaching hospital departmental heads who are also paid consultants to the pharmaceutical industry.

Fortunately, the pendulum in medical circles seems to be swinging away from the solicitations of Big Pharma. These days, refusing to see drug reps is often regarded as endearing eccentricity rather than dubious weirdness.

Amid squeals and to their credit, a number of Australian medical colleges have released tougher recommendations for dealing with my profession's corporate sponsors. This is probably just as well when block-buster drugs like Vioxx are regularly busted by trials or meta-analyses.

Of course, even a meta-analysis isn't always what it seems. A recent review found that those funded by pharmaceutical companies, compared with those done without industry support, are less transparent with fewer reservations about methodological limitations of the included trials, and have more favourable conclusions than the corresponding Cochrane reviews.

Anyway, back to the question of "Who's really at risk of contracting hep B?" A quick squiz inside the pamphlet has just revealed the inconvenient truth - it's nubile women in bikinis.