"The Office of Research and Development at the Environmental Protection Agency is seeking outside public relations consultants, to be paid up to $5 million over five years, to polish its Web site, organize focus groups on how to buff the office's image and ghostwrite articles 'for publication in scholarly journals and magazines,'" the New York Times reports. But the non-profit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility has asked the agency's Inspector General to investigate the request for proposals. PEER questions the "appropriateness of using funds for image enhancement that would otherwise be available for public health and environmental research," citing current laws that prohibit the use of tax dollars "for publicity or propaganda purposes." The EPA has recently awarded two PR contracts totaling $150,000 for the writing and placement of "good stories" about EPA's research office in consumer and trade publications, the Times reports.

Drug companies have new top salesmen: doctors. According to the Wall Street Journal, hiring a doctor to speak about drug therapies to other doctors has proven to be a "highly effective" way for the pharmaceutical industry to market its drugs. "An internal study done by Merck & Co. several years ago calculated the 'return on investment' from doctor-led discussion groups was almost double the return on meetings led by the company's own sales force," the Journal reports. "According to the document, doctors who attended a lecture by another doctor wrote an additional $623.55 worth of prescriptions for the painkiller Vioxx over a 12-month period compared with doctors who didn't attend. Doctors who participated in the more intimate discussions wrote an additional $717.53 worth of prescriptions for Vioxx, which Merck pulled from the market last year over concerns about cardiovascular side effects. That compared to an increase of only $165.87 in Vioxx prescriptions by doctors who attended a meeting with a salesperson."

Australian forestry giant Gunns has suffered a major setback in its $A6.3 million SLAPP suit against 20 environmentalists and environmental groups. Last December Gunns filed a 216-page statement of claim against the environmentalists and then, earlier this month, submitted a redrafted 360-page version. Supreme Court Justice Bernard Bongiorno told the company that unless it submitted a "radically altered" version of its claim within 28 days the case would be struck out. He described aspects of Gunns revised claim as "embarrassing" and said that "it would be a singularly unprofitable exercise to attempt to describe every defect in it which needs correction." Responding to the decision Gunns Exective Chairman, John Gay, optimistically told reporters that "suggestions have been made for some redrafting."