GPs should do more to combat sexual infections

GPs must play a bigger role in the fight against sexually transmitted infections, and ministers should be prepared to pay them for it, experts said this week.

Jackie Cassell, an epidemiologist at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, told a meeting organised by the Science Media Centre, an independent body working to promote the voice of the scientific community in the national news media, that thousands of people with a sexually transmitted infection were visiting their GP each year only to be turned away without diagnosis or treatment—and in some cases without …