Report spurs Atlanta vaccination reform
ACHJ member and Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Alison Young followed up her initial report on unvaccinated students in Atlanta schools with a story about the school districts’ resulting crackdown. Young also questioned some schools’ claims of 100 percent compliance, based on changes in the way schools counted students without required booster shots.
According to Young, the worst-offending school districts had taken significant measures to become compliant with local vaccination requirements. One district even kicked 105 students out of class on Jan. 30 for noncompliance.
A few area schools have not yet vaccinated all students, Young found. She said that a work group recently began meeting to assign roles and responsibilities for enforcing the law.
Young even discovered an internal Atlanta school district email urging vaccination compliance because of the possibility of follow-up stories in the media.
“The ‘perception in the state is that Fulton County and Atlanta have the worst immunization rates and are nonresponsive to blatant notification of violations or media scrutiny and the media is ready to write a follow-up story documenting this fact,’” a district official wrote.
Related:
Avian flu still a danger, CDC official tells fellows
This is a guest post from Marshall Allen of the Las Vegas Sun. Allen is among the first class of AHCJ-CDC Health Journalism Fellows who are spending the week studying public health issues at two Atlanta campuses of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Marshall Allen (right), a Las Vegas Sun reporter, speaks to Grant Baldwin, Ph.D., director of the CDC’s Injury Center, about interpreting child safety data for localizing stories. (Photo: Christy Stretz)
Media furor over avian influenza, also known as bird flu, has died down in recent years, but that’s more a reflection on the news cycle than the actual threat posed by the disease, according to a CDC expert.
That’s the assessment of Dr. Scott Dowell of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s global disease detection program. Dowell spoke Wednesday to a group of 11 AHCJ-CDC fellows, who are in Atlanta to learn about the federal agency’s programs around the world.
Dowell said there is less anxiety about bird flu, also known as H5N1, than there was in the early days of the outbreak, but it still remains a danger. Since 2003, the disease has infected nearly 400 people in more than a dozen countries in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, Europe and the Near East. Read more
Group tackles shady practices of Calif. insurers
Filed under: Government, Health care reform, Health policy, Hot Health Headline
In California Lawyer, Jeanette Borzo tells the story of how Los Angeles city attorneys and a private law firm teamed up to take on California insurance giants with allegations that the insurers are using intentionally obtuse forms to create excuses to rescind health coverage rather than pay for major claims.
Borzo reports that lawyer William Shernoff “argued that Blue Shield’s policy applications were designed to confuse, so that misstatements would provide an excuse for rescission should a policyholder ever require expensive treatment.” Shernoff wrote that “at a time when the policyholders are seriously ill, the insurance company walks away, leaving them uninsured, uninsurable and buried in debt.”
The lawsuits attracted the attention of California regulators and health providers alike. Doctors and hospitals, often stuck with the bills when coverage is rescinded for possibly bogus reasons, joined the class action against companies like Blue Cross of California.
“‘… it appears to have evolved into a cost-savings method,’ [Los Angeles Chief Assistant City Attorney Jeffrey] Isaacs says. ‘It’s a systematic, institutional process to flag and pull anything that looks costly to the company.’ Some insurers, he notes, even have a list of ‘rescission diagnostic codes’—a group of medical conditions that, when reported on claims, trigger an investigation into potential falsehoods on a policyholder’s application that might justify rescission.”
Three of California’s biggest insurers, Blue Cross, Blue Shield, and Health Net, have already been fined $18.3 million, but the attorneys and advocates continue to bring cases to court and push for legislative reforms.
Related:
- Anthem Blue Cross agrees to take back clients, pay $1-million fine (Feb. 11, 2009)
- Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog details other settlements (Feb. 11, 2009)
Newspaper: Landmark autism study used fixed data
An investigation by the Times of London finds that “The doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism.”
Andrew Wakefield’s research was published in The Lancet in 1998 and involved just 12 children. However, once it was published, the paper reports that rates of inoculation fell from 92 percent to below 80 percent.
The Times‘ investigation, which it says has been confirmed by evidence presented to the General Medical Council:
“In evidence presented to the GMC, however, there has emerged potential explanations of how Wakefield was able to obtain the results he did. This evidence, combined with unprecedented access to medical records, a mass of confidential documents and cooperation from parents during an investigation by this newspaper, has shown the selective reporting and changes to findings that allowed a link between MMR and autism to be asserted.”
Report exposes failures of Army mental health care
This week on Salon.com, Mark Benjamin and Michael de Yoanna are posting the results of their investigation into climbing “preventable death” rates among American soldiers. The reporters focused on the cases of soldiers in Ft. Collins, Colo., but also included the national implications of their findings. In January, they report, the army suspects more soldiers killed themselves than died in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
Their findings are being published in a series called Coming Home:
“Salon put together a sample of 25 suicides, prescription overdoses and murders among soldiers at Colorado’s Fort Carson since 2004. Intensive study of 10 of those cases exposed a pattern of preventable deaths, meaning a suicide or murder might have been avoided if the Army had better handled the predictable, well-known symptoms of a malady rampant among combat veterans: combat-related stress and brain injuries.”
According to Benjamin and de Yoanna, many, if not all, of the deaths were preventable. They point to systemic problems with the military culture and the military standard of medical and psychological care as the root cause. The reporters said the Army’s mental health system had failed the soldiers, many of whom had returned from Iraq and suffered classic symptoms of chronic PTSD.
Iowa senator calls for FDA transparency
Filed under: Hot Health Headline, Pharmaceuticals
In a Philadelphia Inquirer profile, reporter Miriam Hill says crusading Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has turned his sights on the FDA and its relationship with major pharmaceutical companies.
Sen. Charles Grassley
The article describes Grassley’s efforts to improve transparency and disclosure of payments from drug companies to its researchers. He also has proposed “restructuring the FDA to make it easier for agency scientists to speak out if safety problems come to light after a drug is on the market. He also wants drug and medical-device companies to publish payments to researchers and doctors on a public Web site.”
Grassley’s doggedness has won praise:
“His scrutiny of the relationships between academic physicians and industry has resulted in greater transparency and accountability for our profession,” said Steve Nissen, an Avandia critic and head of cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic, which recently started disclosing payments from drug companies to its researchers.
Review finds no link between vaccines, autism
A review of 20 studies has concluded that there is no link between vaccines and autism. The review, “Vaccines and Autism: A Tale of Shifting Hypotheses,” is published in the Feb. 15 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases.
In an invited article (PDF), Jeffrey S. Gerber and Paul A. Offit, Division of Infectious Diseases, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, report that:
“Twenty epidemiologic studies have shown that neither thimerosal nor MMR vaccine causes autism. These studies have been performed in several countries by many different investigators who have employed a multitude of epidemiologic and statistical methods. The large size of the studied populations has afforded a level of statistical power sufficient to detect even rare associations.”
The review looked at three common theories about how vaccines are linked to autism:
- the combination measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism by damaging the intestinal lining, which allows the entrance of encephalopathic proteins
- thimerosal, an ethylmercury-containing preservative in some vaccines, is toxic to the central nervous system
- the simultaneous administration of multiple vaccines overwhelms or weakens the immune system
Offit says that fears about vaccines are pushing down immunization rates and having a real impact on public health. “Parents should realize that a choice not to get a vaccine is not a risk-free choice. It’s just a choice to take a different, and far more serious, risk.”
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s coverage wins award
Citing high ratings for accuracy and credibility, the Boston-based Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making has given the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel the foundation’s first award for Excellence in Health Journalism.
The award was for the work of the health and science team, including AHCJ member John Fauber, as rated on the Foundation-sponsored Web site healthnewsreview.org. According to the foundation’s press release, the Journal Sentinel received more top ratings than any other newspaper of a similar size. The award comes with cash and a certificate.
“We were very surprised and pleased by this recognition,” said Becky Lang, the Journal Sentinel’s health and science editor. “In the current media environment of instant Internet coverage and reduced staffing in credible news outlets, the pressure is on for us to keep the standards high. It is even more important than ever for us to provide health stories that are meaningful, accurate, reader friendly and that delve deeper than the surface. We welcome this kind of oversight.”
Databases, search engine help with research
The Resource Shelf Web site has posted a list of some health and safety databases, plus a search tool that sends queries to PubMed, Harrison’s Online, MerckManual and TRIPDatabase.
Resource Shelf offers descriptions and links to the following:
- Emergency Response Safety and Health Database
- United Network for Organ Sharing Database
- Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tool
- Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System
- National Electronic Injury Surveillance System
- Vivisimo Bio MetaCluster
In Calif. lab, researchers put innovations to the test
Sandy Kleffman of the Contra Costa Times visited Kaiser Permanente’s Sidney R. Garfield Center for Health Care Innovation, where researchers from Kaiser and other organizations come together to test their innovations in real-world situations.
The 37,000-square-foot warehouse in San Leandro, south of Oakland, was built in 2006 and contains mock living rooms, operating rooms and more.
“The goal is to discover unforeseen problems before health care firms spend large sums of money on innovations that sound great in the laboratory but don’t work in the real world,” Kleffman reported.
When Kleffman and other reporters visited, researchers were testing everything from a remote video diagnostic tool to the Nintendo Wii and its use in rehabilitation.
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Awards for Excellence in Health Care JournalismDeadline: Feb. 3
- How I did it: Falsified charts in nursing homes linked to patient care
- Access Denied: Looking at a lack of health care availability
- Transparency & medical errors: Public reporting of patient harm is a potent force
- Focus on freelancing: Tips for buying liability insurance
- Why do some patients get stuck in hospitals for weeks, months?
- Investigate health professionals and the boards that regulate them
- Presidents of AHCJ, SPJ call for more openness from Obama administration
