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The mainstream media often fail to report when drug company funding is used for studies of medications, a new review found.

What’s more, there’s a tendency among both medical and mainstream reporters to use brand names, rather than generic names, when referring to specific medications.

And both of these factors work to skew public and medical opinion toward commercial interests, according to the review, published in the Oct. 1 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

This, despite newspaper editors’ assertions to the contrary, the study authors found.

“As a doctor, I am increasingly worried in recent years that company-funded research can’t be trusted in the same way that other research can be trusted,” said study author Dr. Michael Hochman, a resident physician at Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, Mass. “[Also], all of us, doctors, patients, journalists, have gotten into a bad habit of referring to medications by their proprietary brand names. At a philosophical level, I think we need to be referring to them by the generic name. We want to keep commercial interests as much out of the doctor-patient relationship as possible.”

“Funding sources should be included in every story where it’s relevant,” added Andrew Holtz, past president of the Association of Health Care Journalists, former CNN medical correspondent and now an independent journalist. But, he also pointed out, the new study itself may be biased because it only included in its analysis stories of at least 200 words.

“Two hundred words is not a very long story and I didn’t see in the study anything about whether there was a correlation between length of article and how thorough the article was in mentioning funding and generic and brand names,” Holtz said. Such stories, he added, may be leaving out other important information as well, including, for instance, the side effects of a particular drug.

Peer-reviewed medical journals earlier engaged in a similar debate and most now require that study authors disclose funding sources.

The authors of the new study analyzed 306 news articles about medication research from U.S. newspaper and online sites, and they also asked 100 editors at the most widely circulated newspapers in the country about their reporting practices. The studies that were analyzed had been published in five prominent medical journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine.

Forty-two percent of the news articles did not state when drug research had received funding from the pharmaceutical industry. And when they did, it was often buried in the text.

Sixty-seven percent of 277 articles that reported on medications only used the drug’s brand name in at least half of the references to the medication. According to the study authors, up to $9 billion is spent each year in the United States when doctors prescribe brand name drugs although a generic would do just as well.

Yet 88 percent of the responding newspaper editors thought that articles they published often or always mentioned company funding. And 77 percent of the editors thought their stories referred to medications by their generic names.

Three percent of the newspapers had formal, written policies regarding disclosure of company funding, and 2 percent had such policies regarding the use of generic names of drugs.

“News organizations, in my opinion, really should have explicit written policies that they enforce,” Hochman said. “We always need to disclose how a medical study is funded. I’m particularly concerned about commercial studies. We have many examples of how company-led research led us astray.”

Hochman referred specifically to the Vioxx (rofecoxib) scandal; the arthritis drug was withdrawn from the market in 2004 because of concerns that it increased heart risks.

As for preferring generic drug names — many of which are unpronounceable, even for experts — over brand names, Hochman conceded that will be an uphill battle.

“It’s a problem but we’re not going to change it unless we take the hard step of trying to learn generic names,” he said.

Researchers from Lancashire, England, and Chicago, IL, have discovered that animals farmed for meat are the main source of bacteria responsible for food poisoning.

They suggested that 97 pct of the foodbourne illnesses are caused by bacteria typically found in chicken and livestock.

While studying campylobacteriosis cases, the research team found that 97 pct of the cases in Lancashire, UK, were caused by bacteria typically found in chicken and livestock.

The study was based on DNA-sequence comparison of thousands of bacteria collected from human patients and animal carriers.

The research team led by Daniel Wilson, of the University of Chicago, and formerly Lancaster University, United Kingdom, sequenced the DNA of bacteria collected from 1,231 patients and compared it to Campylobacter jejuni DNA sequences collected from wild and domestic animals, and the environment.

They used evolutionary modelling to trace the ancestry of human C jejuni back to one of seven source populations.

The team found that in 57 percent of cases, the bacteria could be traced to chicken, and in 35 percent to cattle. Wild animal and environmental sources were accountable for just three percent of disease.

“The dual observations that livestock are a frequent source of human disease isolates and that wild animals and the environment are not, strongly support the notion that preparation or consumption of infected meat and poultry is the dominant transmission route,” said Wilson.

The study appears in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics.

Women who were bigger and longer babies may be more likely to develop breast cancer, researchers reported on Tuesday.

The study adds to evidence that, at least in some cases, something that happens in the womb may cause cancer later in life.

Previous research into links between birth size and breast cancer have proved inconsistent, but the findings published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine are strong evidence that the two may be related.

“These findings provide strong evidence that birth size — in particular birth length — is a marker of a woman’s breast cancer risk in adulthood, although the mechanisms underlying this association are unclear,” Isabel dos Santos Silva of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and colleagues wrote.

Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths among women worldwide, according to the American Cancer Society. The group estimates about 465,000 women died of breast cancer globally in 2007, and 1.3 million new cases were diagnosed.

Declining death rates from breast cancer in developed countries have been attributed to early detection through mammography screening and to improved treatment.

Dos Santos Silva and colleagues examined 32 studies comprising 600,000 women, mainly in developed countries. Their analysis included more than 22,000 women who had breast cancer.

After considering established risk factors such as age and late menopause, the researchers found a strong association with birth size, birth length and head circumference. Of the three, birth length showed the strongest link.

“The amount by which birth size affected breast cancer risk was not affected by allowing for other established risk factors,” the researchers wrote.

For example, women with recorded birth weights of 4 kilograms or more had a 12 percent higher chance of breast cancer than babies weighing 3 to 3.5 kilograms at birth, the study found.

The link between breast cancer and birth size appeared smaller when compared with other risk factors. The researchers estimated that birth size may be responsible for up to 5 percent of all women who develop breast cancer by the age of 80.

Some research has linked hormones such as estrogen and human growth hormone with cancer.

The researchers noted age of puberty and adult height are also associated with breast cancer risk, and growth as a fetus can predict a girl’s growth, so there could be a link there.

“The maternal and/or foetal hormonal environment associated with large birth size may alter programing of the breast, making it more susceptible to cancer,” the researchers wrote.

Children need plenty of sleep to keep them healthy and happy.

Take note of these warning signs that your child may need a daily nap, courtesy of the Nemours Foundation:

• Acting sleepy during the day.
• Acting cranky or fussy late in the afternoon.
• Difficulty getting out of bed in the morning.
• Difficulty concentrating, hyperactivity, impatience or aggression.
• Problems concentrating on school work or other tasks.