>(4) HAVE MEDICAL JOURNALS HELPED TO
>JUSTIFY WAR?
>
>(Letter: Medical journals may have had a role in
>justifying war)
>http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/326/7393/820
>
>Medical journals may have played an important part in
>providing the political justification for attacking Iraq,
>argues a public health expert in this week's BMJ.
>
>Professor Ian Roberts believes that most people in the
>United States and the United Kingdom would have
>preferred not to launch a military attack on the people of
>Iraq. To persuade them to do so, they need to believe
>that they are being attacked.
>
>Medical journals have (unwittingly) had an important
>propaganda role in persuading the public that it is being
>attached, he writes.
>
>To illustrate this point, he compared the number of
>articles on bioterrorism published in five major medical
>journals between 1999 and 2002 with the number of
>articles published on road traffic crashes (which kill
>about 3,000 people and disable about 30,000 each day
>worldwide).
>
>Articles on bioterrorism outnumbered articles on road
>traffic crashes in both 2001 and 2002. Of the 124
>articles on bioterrorism, 63% originated in the United
>States and the rest in the United Kingdom. JAMA
>published the largest proportion (47%), followed by the
>BMJ (21%), the Lancet (16%), and the New England
>Journal of Medicine (15%).
>
>Compared with a health problem that kills 3,000 people
>per day, the public health importance of bioterrorism has
>been over emphasised in the leading medical journals, he
>says.
>
>"I am not implying that this is a deliberate attempt to
>alarm the population, but nevertheless it may have had
>this effect. As a result, medical journals may have
>unwittingly played an important political part in justifying
>war in Iraq," he concludes.
>
>Contact:
>
>Ian Roberts, Professor of Epidemiology and Public
>Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical
>Medicine, London, UK
>Email: ian.roberts at lshtm.ac.uk
>