"World Hepatitis Day...does not usually make the headlines in the same way that World AIDS day does, but viral hepatitis affects about half a billion people globally (perhaps 1 in 12 of the global population) and so the relative publicity associated with World Hepatitis Day does not accurately reflect the importance of hepatitis as a public-health problem.”

In this World Hepatitis Day blog ahead of the formal publication of their Perspective article in PLoS Medicine, Paul Klenerman, Vicki Fleming and Ellie Barnes of the University of Oxford describe research by Christian Drosten and colleagues [2] about a new low-cost diagnostic test for Hepatitis C for use in developing countries. The research was recently published in PLoS Medicine.

This was a question posed by Denise Grady in an article in the New York Times [5] earlier this month. Her piece outlined the arguments in a PLoS Medicine debate [6] on the ethical responsibilities of doctors towards their patients that was published back in October.

The debate examined the question of whether a surgeon treating patients with cancer whose treatment results are not as good as those at another hospital, has an ethical obligation to tell to his or her patients about the better results at hospitals elsewhere. And although the debate did not attract a lot of attention in the wider media when it was published, it has recently fuelled considerable and thoughtful comment on the New York Times site and on blogs.

Publication bias became a big blogging topic recently as a PLoS Medicine paper was picked up by several influential sites. Lisa Bero and colleagues [10] found that a quarter of trials submitted to the Food and Drug Administration between 2001 and 2002 in support of new drugs applications remain unpublished a year after the fact. The study also found that among the published results, unexplained discrepancies between the FDA submission and the published studies tended to lead to more favourable presentations of the drugs.

A Health in Action paper [14] published in PLoS Medicine recently describes the success of an innovative project called inSPOT [15] – an e-card notification system that enables people who have been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease to inform their sexual partners that they may also be at risk.

PLoS Medicine invited Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ and
current board member of PLoS [19], to discuss an essay published this week by Neal Young, John Ioannidis and Omar Al-Ubaydli [20] that argues that the current system of publication in biomedical research provides a distorted view of the reality of scientific data.