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Ian Roberts, Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK believes that most people in the USA and UK would have preferred not to go to war on Iraq. To persuade them to do so, they need to believe that they are being attacked. To this end, he said, in a letter published in the BMJ (Volume 326, p 820) that medical journals have (unwittingly) played a propaganda role. The professor compared the number of bioterrorism articles published in five major medical journals, from 1999 to 2002, with the number published on road traffic crashes (daily killing some 3,000 people and disabling about 30,000, worldwide). Articles on bioterrorism outnumbered those on traffic crashes in 2001-2002. Of 124 articles on bioterrorism, 63% originated in the USA, 37% in the UK. JAMA published the biggest number (47%), followed by the BMJ (21%), Lancet (16%), and New England Journal of Medicine (15%). Compared with daily traffic deaths, he concluded that the public health importance of bioterrorism has been over emphasised in leading medical journals. Images courtesy of The Prince of Wales Hospital, Hong Kong and Hong Kong University © Report by Brenda Marsh