Today's Globe: drug company gifts, doctor referral line, Caritas out of MHA, anthrax suspect suicide, Tysabri cases, side effects

Late yesterday afternoon, Massachusetts House and Senate lawmakers reached a compromise on a contentious provision to clamp down on drug companies' gifts and meals provided to physicians. Not an outright ban on drug company gifts, it requires the companies to report to the state Department of Public Health any payment or subsidy over $50 made to a healthcare professional (11th paragraph).

To make it easier to find a doctor in Boston, the city's health department is starting a telephone referral service that will connect residents with primary care physicians who are accepting new patients, Mayor Thomas M. Menino announced yesterday.

Caritas Christi Health Care System, New England's second-largest hospital chain, yesterday resigned its $700,000 membership in the Massachusetts Hospital Association, the state's powerful lobby for acute-care hospitals.

One of the nation's top biodefense researchers has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him in the anthrax mailing assaults of 2001 that killed five, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

Biogen Idec Inc. said two more patients taking its promising multiple sclerosis drug, Tysabri, appear to have contracted a rare and potentially fatal brain disease, the first cases since the Cambridge biotech company reintroduced the treatment two years ago.

"Whether there's a windfall in it or not, I think if you make a great product, and it happens to cause an awful side effect, maybe you could be a little interested in a treatment," Monique Doyle Spencer, author of "The Courage Muscle: A Chicken's Guide to Living With Breast Cancer," writes on the op-ed page about "a side effect from a chemotherapy drug for metastatic, or in medical terms 'not so great,' breast and colon cancer."