FRCP ED, associate professor of pharmacology drug; how it is expected to help; and how to recognise problems and what to do about them. A guide was designed to specify what information is required to meet these needs. Using this guide, a set of minimum information on tetracycline was prepared that aimed at being brief, specific, and readable. The best format for the information remains to be determined.Since leaflets produced by professional organisations are generally unsuitable for these purposes, information sets should be put together by small independent groups consisting of clinical pharmacologists, clinicians, pharmacists, and consumers. Each country should produce its own sets, adapting model sets to the circumstances of local practice.

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MRDICAL JOURNAL 637 details of the register, including operational details and the design of the register cards, will be published later. ResultsData on 478 families have been collected. In 83 families the disorder in question either proved not to be genetic or the cause was unresolved. No individuals were considered to be at risk in these families. The distribution of the various types of genetic disease (see Table) among the remaining families is not representative of the population as a whole, but partly reflects the department's particular interests-for example, in the X-linked muscular dystrophies.Of the 478 families, 249 were referred specifically for genetic counselling-50 autosomal dominant, 56 autosomal recessive, 33 X-linked recessive, 61 multifactorial, 22 chromosomal, and 27 in which the disorder was either not genetic or the cause was unresolved.Individuals at risk of becoming affected themselves mainly concemed autosomal dominant disorders-that is, 245 out of a total of 280 subjects were considered to be at risk. This is mainly because many of these disorders were of late onset and occurred in large families-for example, myotonic dystrophy, Huntington's chorea, and polyposis coli.Of 717 subjects at risk of having an affected child or of having a carrier daughter (X-linked recessive disorders), autosomal dominant and X-linked disorders accounted for 646. In the case of autosomal dominant disorders many were at risk both of becoming affected and of having affected children.A total of 56 affected children ("preventable cases") were born to parents who, a priori, were at high risk of having affected offspring. There were a further 94 individuals at high risk of becoming affected, but so far they have shown no signs of the disease. DiscussionOur results indicate that the main scope for preventing genetic disease lies with the simply inherited disorders, because in general the proportion of individuals at high risk is greater than in the case of multifactorial and chromosomal disorders. Even in simply inherited disorders, however, it will be possible to prevent only a proportion of cases, since some will occur in families in which there has been no previous history of the disease.Only a relatively small proportion of individuals at risk of having affected children (or carrier daughters in the case of X-linked disorders) were referred specifically for genetic counselling (101 out of a total of 717, or 14%). Many affected children were born to parents who, a priori, were at high risk of having affected children but who had never been counselled and were therefore unaware of the risks. Others were referred for counselling only after the birth of an affected child which might otherwise have been prevented. At present no defined procedure for tracing such individuals exists. Herein lies the value of a genetic register system. The first step in such a system is the ascertainment of those at risk. This could be achieved through general practitioner, hospital, and health department records linked to a genetic re...

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SummaryThe prescriber needs adequate and concise information about each product that he uses, to allow him to obtain optimal effects while minimising harm. Neither the present UK data sheets nor their equivalents in other countries have succeeded in providing such information clearly or completely. This paper develops the proposals on the arrangement of drug information made in the WHO report "The selection of essential drugs." Three sets of minimum information (on tetracycline, propranolol, and aspirin) which illustrate this approach were compared with the manufacturers' data sheets: the latter were incomplete. The information content of our proposals was worked out with a group of clinical pharmacologists, general practitioners, and specialists, and we suggest that this approach should be extended to other drugs. IntroductionIt is now universally recognised that prescribers need accurate objective information about the drugs they use, but a satisfactory way of providing it has not been found. The longest established sources of such information are the pharmacopoeias, but these do not contain enough for prescribers' needs and they do