“If the committee made future announcements in this way it would support health professionals and encourage informed decision-making by the public rather than create panic and confusion,” she says in a recent letter in the British Medical Journal.Keith Tones, professor of health education at Leeds Metropolitan University, agrees: “It is a very good idea to let practitioners know in advance. This would allow time to prepare for the obvious anxieties which their patients will present to them.”Warnings that generate some fear and anxiety can, of course, be productive, as with smoking and lung cancer, cervical screening and breast cancer checks. They can, however, become counter-productive if perceived to be an over-reaction.Sarah Stewart-Brown, director of the Health Services Research Unit at Oxford University, says that future health “alerts” should be backed up with educational material and advice. There have been complaints about the way doctors found out about it, and about whether it should ever have been the subject of a CSM warning. The risks are so very tiny.”The British Medical Association is also unhappy about the way the alert was handled. Dr Ian Bogle, chairman of the General Medical Services Committee, who wrote to the CSM and the Government about the problems, says: “I firmly believe that on those occasions when it is felt necessary to alert the profession to possible risks associated with the use of any drug, the profession must be alerted well before public statements are issued. But many doctors were ill-prepared to cope; some surgeries were besieged with calls before they had received the announcement themselves.Dr Christine Horrocks, head of family planning at the Frenchay NHS Trust in Bristol, says: “I think the whole thing was very badly handled.

The first is that the increased risk is often relatively small; the second is that people get their primary information from the media rather than from their doctors. When theCommittee on the Safety of Medicines, the Government’s drug watchdog, issued its Pill warning, it said women taking the seven brands should not stop but should see their GP. Other agencies involved said that the DoH should have anticipated the alarm and set in place ways of dealing with the expected response.Many health scares have two ingredients in common. It has also led to calls for the Government to tighten up on the way any health “alert” is delivered, with doctors and health agencies saying that they should be better prepared, in order to provide counselling and advice.Another crisis occurred earlier this month, with leaked news of a faulty testing procedure for HIV.

The test manufacturer, the Chicago-based Abbott Laboratories, had suspended distribution of the test on 25 March, but no announcement was made by the Department of Health. News of the faulty tests – with four positive results falsely testing negative in more than 2.5 million tests worldwide – leaked out just before Easter, when helplines were jammed with calls for advice. The National Aids Helpline had more than 5,000 calls in three days, and the Terrence Higgins Trust had more than 1,000 calls. But although the risk was increased it was still small: 30 per 100,000 for women on the high-risk brands.

The panic, which led to 100,000 women losing confidence in the Pill according to a survey from Exeter University, is just one of a number of incidents that have led to complaints about the way new research findings are handled. “I remember it was really difficult to get an appointment to see the doctor that Thursday and Friday – I think everybody was trying to do the same thing,” she recalls. “I had a very bad pregnancy, I was quite ill and I underwent an abortion where the risks to my health were far greater than those of the Pill.”The announcement that turned her life upside down was based on three separate studies that showed that seven brands of Pill, taken by 1.5 million women, were twice as likely to cause blood clots as other brands. The panic that followed is estimated to have led to about 3,000 abortions in Britain, while a baby boom is predicted for June and July. This week, it emerged that more than 800 extra abortions were carried out by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service alone, which also said that 41 per cent of women stopped taking the Pill immediately and 61 per cent did not finish their course as a result of the scare.
So could the Government have handled it better? Catherine Clark still feels angry about her experience, and argues that the way she got to hear about the findings made her panic unnecessarily. Two months later the 31-year-old economics adviser discovered she was pregnant. After some weeks of pain and persistent sickness, she was admitted to hospital for an abortion.