BMJ 2001;323 ( 18 August )

Editor's choice

The passage from the BMJ to the Scunthorpe Daily Echo or CNN

Every Tuesday the BMJ sends out hundreds of press releases on what's in the forthcoming issue. The other big journals send them too. We do this in the hope that it improves both the quality and quantity of coverageplus we want to bang our own drum. Some weeks the BMJ gets massive coverage, but other weeks it gets almost none.

Picking the stories to press release is tricky, but one rule is to pick stories that the media are likely to cover rather than ones we think they should be covering. Much as we might like the media to cover stories that we think are important, they won't if they judge them "worthy but dull." You can read our press releases on bmj.com each week, but I thought I'd describe here the stories we have picked this weekso that you can gain some insight into our thinking (or biases). You can look too at the media to see if any are covered.

There is highly likely to be coverage (in Britain at least) of the study that finds that people who live near landfill sites (which are filled with waste, some of it toxic) are more likely to have babies with congenital anomalies and of low birth weight (p 363). This is a huge study of over eight million births and finds surprisingly that 80% of people in Great Britain live within 2 km of a site. The challenge for the media will be to make clear that we do not know whether the association is causal. As an editorial describes (p 351), there are many other possible explanations.

There will be press conferences in both mainland China and Hong Kong on the study that shows that the catastrophic epidemic of tobacco related deaths that is predicted for China is already under way in Hong Kong, where people began to smoke in large numbers some 20 years earlier (p 361). It will be interesting to see if this story, which has huge public health implications, receives any coverage outside China.

We will also be press releasing the studies that suggest that birth order is important in determining whether children develop type 1 diabetes (p 369) and that it is possible to identify and safely discharge from emergency departments some patients who may at first seem to have had myocardial infarctions (p 372). These medically important studies might be upstaged by letters showing that European politicians are shilly-shallying over cancer screening (p 396) and that British primary schools don't contain adequate facilities for the one in eight girls who begin to menstruate at primary school (p 398).

You could of course dispense with reading the journals and rely on the mass media. Many doctors do, but we hope you won't.

Footnotes

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