Berlin (dpa) - Twice as many people in Germany are killed by the side-effects of medicines than in road accidents each year, according to researchers in the northern German city of Bremen.

At least 200,000 people a year are made seriously ill by the side- effects of drugs and between 12,000 and 16,000 of these cases result in death, said Peter Schoenhoefer, former director of the Institute for Clinical Pharmacology at Bremen Central Hospital.

By comparison, 7,772 Germans were killed in road traffic accidents last year, according to official figures from the federal statistics agency.

Medical problems caused by drugs side-effects also cost billions of dollars a year, said the AgV, the German umbrella group of consumer organisations, at the launch of its new handbook on medicinal drugs.

But the Association of Drug Manufacturers in Germany criticised the calculations as "unreliable projections."

Schoenhoefer, who is now one of the publishers of the "Drugs Telegram" in Berlin, has led a team that recorded cases of drugs side-effects in Bremen's four major hospitals since 1985, from which it projected a figure for the whole of Germany.

But a spokesman for the Association of Drug Manufacturers said: "Four hospitals in the smallest state in Germany cannot be considered a representative statistical basis for the whole country."

Compared to other European countries, Germany has neither the highest or lowest number of cases of drugs side-effects, said Schoenhoefer. "Other studies have shown that between one third and one half of deaths caused by medicinal drugs could have been avoided by more information and adequate choice of drugs," he added.

Thomas Isenburg, a health expert who works for the consumer organisation AgV, said studies show that 300,000 hospital admissions a year in Germany are caused by the side-effects and interaction of medicines. "Last year this accounted for six per cent of all admissions and cost 1.5 billion marks," he said.

He calculates another 2.5 billion marks could be saved if doctors prescribed cheaper medication. He claimed 30 per cent of all prescriptions are unnecessarily made out for expensive original brands rather than cheaper alternatives.

The new "Kursbuch Medikamente und Wirkstoffe" (handbook of drugs and active substances), published by Zabert Sandmann of Munich, claims to be the first manual on the German market which advises against the prescription of certain drugs. Doctors Gabi Hoffbauer and Andreas von Maxen, along with the pharmacist Andreas Heeke, evaluated more than 4,000 medicinal drugs, which they say represent 80 to 90 per cent of all prescribed drugs in Germany. They were critical of around one third of them.

(From Deutsche Presse-agentur)