Disease-mongering promotes non-existent diseases and exaggerates mild problems to boost profits, the Public Library of Science Medicine reported.

Researchers at Newcastle University in Australia said firms were putting healthy people at risk by medicalising conditions such as menopause.

But the pharmaceutical industry denied it invented diseases.

Report authors David Henry and Ray Moynihan criticised attempts to convince the public in the US that 43% of women live with sexual dysfunction.

They also said that risk factors like high cholesterol and osteoporosis were being presented as diseases - and rare conditions such as restless leg condition and mild problems of irritable bowel syndrome were exaggerated.

The report said: "Disease-mongering is the selling of sickness that widens the boundaries of illness and grows the markets for those who sell and deliver treatments.

Campaigns

"It is exemplified mostly explicitly by many pharmaceutical industry-funded disease awareness campaigns - more often designed to sell drugs than to illuminate or to inform or educate about the prevention of illness or the maintenance of health."

The researchers called on doctors, patients and support groups to be aware of the marketing tactics of the pharmaceutical industry and for more research into the way in which conditions are presented.

They added: "The motives of health professionals and health advocacy groups may well be the welfare of patients, rather than any direct self-interested financial benefit, but we believe that too often marketers are able to crudely manipulate those motivations.

"Disentangling the different motivations of the different actors in disease-mongering will be a key step towards a better understanding of this phenomenon."

But Richard Ley, of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, said the research was centred on the US where the drugs industry had much more freedom to promote their products to the public.

"The way you can advertise is much more restricted in the UK so it is wrong to extrapolate it.

"Also, it is not right to say the industry invents diseases, we don't. It is up to doctors to decide what treatment to give people, we can't tell them."

Federal and state health officials have interviewed 30 of those patients. Of the 28 who wore soft contacts, 26 reported using Bausch & Lomb's ReNu brand contact lens solution or a generic type of solution also made by the company based in Rochester, N.Y.

Bausch & Lomb said it will temporarily suspend shipments of ReNu with MoistureLoc made at its Greenville, S.C., plant.

"The CDC data released today are both troubling and perplexing, as there is an apparent disproportionate representation of U.S.-manufactured ReNu with MoistureLoc in the underlying data. The source of these infections has not been determined," said Ronald L. Zarrella, the firm's chairman and chief executive.

Five of the 26 patients also reported using other types of solutions in addition to ReNu, Bausch & Lomb said. And nine said they wore their contacts overnight, which is known to increase the risk of infection, the CDC said.

Daniel G. Schultz, director of the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said it is too early to tell if Bausch & Lomb's product was the cause of the infections. An estimated 30 million Americans wear soft contacts.

Without treatment, which can last two to three months, the infection can scar the cornea and blind its victims. Eight U.S. patients have required cornea transplants.

Soft contact lens users with eye redness or pain, tearing, increased light sensitivity, blurred vision or discharge should stop wearing them and contact a doctor immediately, said Malvina B. Eydelman, director of the FDA division that regulates contacts.

The Government fears that any pandemic could last more than six months. The documents say that Whitehall should be on alert for a pandemic on an "extended time-scale - certainly for six months ... and perhaps longer". They also suggest "more than one pandemic wave" of bird flu.

Senior vet Douglas Gray inspects a dead swan in Aberdeen
Senior vet Douglas Gray inspects a dead swan in Aberdeen

The documents were drawn up on March 22, a fortnight before a dead swan in a village in Fife was found to have the deadly H5N1 strain of the disease. The swan, which was washed ashore in the village of Cellardyke, had a strain similar to that contracted by 100 birds in Germany. Tests are continuing on hundreds of other dead birds, but none - apart from the swan - has tested positive for H5N1. Fourteen other birds that gave rise to concern tested negative.

The documents show a lack of preparedness in Whitehall that ministers and officials are working round the clock to combat. Their disclosure came as the Government was accused of "astonishing complacency" over planning, with farmers angry about confusing advice and the £1.2 billion poultry industry braced for a consumer backlash.

Industry leaders and poultry staff called for vaccinations to protect birds and farm workers, amid claims that the situation was becoming reminiscent of the foot and mouth crisis, which left thousands of animals on giant pyres.

The Government papers, which have been discussed by the "Cabinet Committee on Influenza Pandemic Planning", include a blueprint for "managing the response" to a pandemic. Whitehall would go into what officials call a full-scale "battle rhythm" with Tony Blair lined up to take personal charge at an as yet unspecified stage.

It is understood that two issues particularly concerning ministers are the difficulties of closing large numbers of schools and the provision of masks to large numbers of people, should the need arise.

A Government paper revealed last week suggested that families might have to wait up to four weeks to bury their dead. Ministers warned that up to 320,000 people could die in a pandemic.

The Cabinet documents reveal how the Environment Department fears that no large-scale plans to combat a pandemic have been lined up by big food companies apart from Marks & Spencer - suggesting a chronic lack of preparedness. They add: "HGV drivers had been identified as a potential pinch-point by some sectors. Various mitigation options were being discussed, including using retired drivers or off-duty fire service personnel, and lifting the requirements of the Working Time Directive."

An accompanying memo by Lord Triesman, the junior foreign office minister, puts forward an exhaustive plan for coping with a bird flu outbreak abroad. In the event of humans being infected, the document suggests, "we may come under pressure from the media and the British public at home to appear to be doing more for our nationals immediately affected by the virus. In particular we would hope to deal with the potential sensitivity of providing Tamilflu antiviral treatment for use by overseas mission staff and their dependents diagnosed with the flu virus under our duty of care obligations, but not to British nationals."

The document admits that France would supply preventive medicine to its overseas citizens while Britons will be told to fend for themselves.

John Kounios of Drexel University, Mark Jung-Beeman of Northwestern University, and their research team report their findings in a new paper to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science.

Previous research by this team demonstrated that the brain functions differently when a person arrives at "Aha!" solutions, compared to methodical solutions. The current study reveals that the distinct patterns of brain activity leading to "Aha!" moments of insight begin much earlier than the time a problem is solved.

The research suggests that people can mentally prepare to have an "Aha!" solution even before a problem is presented. Specifically, as people prepare for problems that they solve with insight, their pattern of brain activity suggests that they are focusing attention inwardly, are ready to switch to new trains of thought, and perhaps are actively silencing irrelevant thoughts.

These findings are important because they show that people can mentally prepare to solve problems with different thinking styles and that these different forms of preparation can be identified with specific patterns of brain activity. This study may eventually lead to an understanding of how to put people in the optimal "frame of mind" to deal with particular types of problems.

This research team's previous study revealed that just prior to an "Aha!" solution, after a person has been working on solving a problem, the brain momentarily reduces visual inputs, with an effect similar to a person shutting his or her eyes or looking away to facilitate the emergence into consciousness of the solution.

The new study extends these findings by suggesting that mental preparation involving inward focus of attention promotes insight even prior to the presentation of a problem. Therefore, it may be that how a person is thinking before problem solving begins is just as important as the kind of thinking involved in reaching the solution, and perhaps even determines whether the solution will be derived with a sudden insight.

Participants in the new study were presented with a series of word puzzles. Each problem consisted of three words (for example, tank, hill, secret), and participants had to think of a single word that could form a compound or common phrase with each of the three words.

People sometimes solve such problems with a sudden flash of insight - the solution suddenly pops into their heads and seems obviously correct - and other times solve such problems more methodically, perhaps "trying out" possible solutions until they hit on the correct one (in this case, top: tank top, hilltop, top secret).

In two parallel experiments, participants solved these problems while brain activity was monitored either with electroencephalograms (EEG), which provide precise timing information and approximate anatomical information, or with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which gives a more precise location of active brain areas, but with less precise timing. The researchers focused on neural activity that occurred during the period just before each problem was displayed.

The two brain imaging techniques yielded highly similar results and showed a different pattern of brain activity prior to problems that they subsequently solved with an "Aha!", compared to the pattern of brain activity prior to problems they solved more methodically.

According to David E. Meyer, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the research, "It's remarkable how similar the results were across the two experiments, using different methods, and these results nicely demonstrate that different types of mental preparation are conducive to different types of problem solving."

Mental preparation that led to insight solutions was generally characterized by increased brain activity in temporal lobe areas associated with conceptual processing, and with frontal lobe areas associated with cognitive control or "top-down" processing. Jung-Beeman noted that "Problem solvers could use cognitive control to switch their train of thought when stuck on a problem, or possibly to suppress irrelevant thoughts, such as those related to the previous problem."

In contrast, preparation that led to more methodical solutions involved increased neural activity in the visual cortex at the back of the brain -- suggesting that preparation for deliberate problem solving simply involved external focus of attention on the video monitor on which the problem would be displayed.

More than a century ago, the great scientist Louis Pasteur said "Chance favors only the prepared mind." By this, he meant that sudden flashes of insight don't just happen, but are the product of preparation. According to Kounios, "We have begun to understand how the brain prepares for creative insight. This will hopefully lead to techniques for facilitating it."