Who do you think you are?

When it comes to negative coverage, the pharmaceutical industry seems to get more than its fair share of attention from the popular media in the UK.

Talk to a sample of the general population in the street and you would expect to find that everyone has experienced or knows someone who has experienced some misfortune at the hands of big, bad, unscrupulous, untrustworthy, greedy pharma.

Faced with an unremitting tide of poor publicity, you could hardly blame the pharmaceutical manufacturers for believing their own bad press and retreating behind the barricades to nurse a case of incipient paranoia.

But some recent research carried out by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) may give them the confidence to put their heads back above the parapet because, far from believing everything they read in the papers, the British public actually has a pretty favourable view of the pharma sector.

More than 2,000 adults were asked for their views and the industry was seen overwhelmingly as a significant contributor to patient welfare, to the developing world and to the UK economy. Furthermore, rather than blaming the drug makers, the public held the UK Government and NICE responsible for lack of access to the latest medicines.

Pharma companies were held to make a more significant contribution to the public's health than the Government, NHS managers or insurance companies, although there were still concerns among the public regarding transparency and ethical issues, and a relatively high proportion of the sample associated terms like "overcharging" and "secretive" with the pharma industry.

Twenty per cent of those questioned believed that medicines should be a higher priority for Government spending, while a third thought the pharma companies should put more investment into developing new medicines.

And interestingly, more than half of the public would trust pharmaceutical companies to give them information about different medicines - a significantly higher figure than for the Internet, the Government or the media.

So in these cold, dark days of economic and political uncertainty, the industry can be reassured that its message is getting through to the public. Make the most of that nice, warm feeling: you've earned it.