Swine flu vaccine might be ready this fall
If all goes well, a vaccine against the H1N1 flu virus could be available for widespread use by October.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shipped samples of the swine flu virus to companies working on the vaccine a few days ago, Reuters reports.
Several companies, including AstraZeneca’s MedImmune unit, have begun working on the vaccine. Pilot batches could be ready in a few weeks for testing in people over the summer. Those trials would help determine the right dose and whether an adjuvant is need to get the right response. The feds have committed $1 billion to aid vaccine development.
An adjuvant, or immune-system booster, might also be used to stretch the supply of vaccine so that the batches produced could protect more people, a CDC official told Reuters.
Covering flu, pandemics and preparednessSeparately, China released a group of school children from Maryland who had been held in quarantine since arriving in the country on a trip a week ago. Meanwhile, Chinese authorities reported the first case of swine flu transmitted from one person to another inside the country.
Hospitals avoid reporting disciplined docs
Filed under: Health data, Hospitals, Hot Health Headline, Public records
The nonprofit group Public Citizen has released a report showing that hospitals nationwide are taking advantage of loopholes to avoid reporting disciplined physicians to a national database. The full report is available here.
The law requires hospitals to report any physician whose admitting privileges have been revoked or restricted for more than 30 days to the National Practitioner Data Bank, but over the database’s 17 years of existence, almost half the nation’s hospitals haven’t reported a single patient. Initially, officials estimated the database would get around 5,000 submissions a year. Instead, it has averaged around 650.
The report says that hospitals avoid the reporting requirement by limiting suspensions to fewer than 30 days or by giving doctors a leave of absence instead of a suspension. Lax peer review is also contributing to under-reporting, as doctors are reluctant to “rat out” their peers.
The data is easy to break down on a state-by-state level, and folks such as the Miami Herald’s John Dorscher, the Detroit Free Press’s Patricia Anstett and the Contra Costa Times‘ Sandy Kleffman have already reported local versions of the story.
Autism and vaccines: A failure to communicate
When it comes to vaccine safety, findings that scientists regard as proven facts haven’t been strong enough to shake public suspicion about a link between childhood immunizations and autism.
Photo by slideshow bob via Flickr
One in four Americans still believes vaccines cause autism, notes an exhaustive and fascinating analysis of the enduring controversy over vaccine risk published by PLoS Biology. An unfortunate fact is now indisputable: As parents shun vaccines, infectious diseases ranging from measles to whooping cough have mounted a comeback.
Medical anthropologist Sharon Kaufman finds profound meaning in the persistence of belief in the vaccine-autism theory. To her, the PLoS article says, the problem illustrates a broader, profound erosion of trust in experts. “People think if you blindly follow experts, you’re not taking personal responsibility,” Kaufman says.
The media is part of the story, says one of the world’s foremost vaccine experts. Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, tells PLoS the vaccine myth is kept alive in part by the “journalistic mantra of ‘balance,’ ” when science supports only one side.
CMS reverses decision on access to Idaho inspection reports
Filed under: Health data, Hospitals, Public records
An apparent “misinterpretation” of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services led to the federal agency warning Idaho to stop posting reports of inspections of nursing homes and hospitals last month.
The warning, according to a May 25 Associated Press story, directed the state to only release the reports after a written request under the Freedom of Information Act was filed.
But an article published May 27 in The Times-News quotes a CMS spokesperson who says the agency checked with its general counsel and “determined that Idaho and any other state can post the reports 14 days after they’re generated.”
State officials had appealed the decision and have said they will resume posting the documents as soon as they received official word of the CMS reversal.
The reports don’t appear to be currently available on the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare’s Web site but the agency is launching a redesigned site this weekend, so perhaps they’ll be available next week.
Premature coverage of abstracts troublesome
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Health journalism
Gary Schwitzer of the University of Minnesota writes about what he calls a “troubling trend:” Reporters are writing articles based upon abstracts for a meeting that hasn’t been held yet.
As Schwitzer points out, this allows companies to make claims about their research without reporters being able to examine all the data and get independent sources to comment on the findings.
Schwitzer goes into more detail and links to some of the stories in question.
Science journalists peer into the future
Six journalists explored “The Future of Science Journalism” during a panel at the Cambridge Science Festival at the MIT Museum.
Panelists included Jill Abramson, managing editor of The New York Times; Philip Hilts, director of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships; Cristine Russell, a freelance journalist and senior fellow at the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs; Andrew Revkin, reporter and blogger for The New York Times; Ivan Oransky, managing editor for online at Scientific American and AHCJ board member; and Evan Hadingham, senior science editor for NOVA.
Abramson predicts future journalism may not be on paper but that “journalism will continue to thrive” based on her belief that “there is a human want and need for trustworthy information about the world we live in, information that is tested, investigated, checked again, analyzed and presented in a cogent form.”
Oransky cites Twitter as a way of getting a new generation back into science and discusses the value of engaging with your audience.
Watch the video online.
Dental malpractice suit shows gaps in information
Filed under: Government, Hot Health Headline, Public records
A web of confidentiality, state politics and gag clauses conspired to conceal a malpractice case settled in 2005 by Dental Board of California President Dr. Suzanne McCormick, the Los Angeles Times‘ Michael Rothfeld found.
McCormick paid a 13-year-old boy’s family $95,000 after she mistakenly removed two permanent molars from the boy who was actually supposed to have his wisdom teeth taken out. McCormick was first appointed to the dental board post in 2006; the office of the governor reappointed her for a second four-year term in March.
The foundations for sweeping the malpractice suit under the rug were laid in 2005, when McCormick obtained a “gag clause” as part of the settlement. The clause prevented the boy’s lawyer from filing a complaint with the very dental board she would soon become a member of, and thus reduced her chances of being formally disciplined for the mistake.
Such gag clauses are illegal for medical doctors in California, but Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has twice vetoed attempts to extend the prohibition to other professions. The dental board itself reviewed the case, but after an outside consultant contacted McCormick (but not the victim or his family), decided no punishment was in order. Cases in which such punishment is not deemed necessary are kept confidential by the board.
Rothfeld’s sources call for greater freedom of information and transparency from such state boards and an end to the gag clauses that are used “to short-circuit the regulatory process that protects the public.”
New FDA brass sets public health agenda
Margaret Hamburg, the new FDA sheriff, and her deputy, Joshua Sharfstein, have laid out a public health manifesto for the agency in the Obama era. No big shocker, given their previous jobs as activist health officials in New York and Baltimore, respectively.
Photo by davidsonscott15 via Flickr
If you’re interested in the details, check out their piece published online by the New England Journal of Medicine. Don’t overlook the lone footnote in the piece, a reference to a Supreme Court decision in 1969 that affirmed the FDA’s broad authority and its constant “overriding purpose”: the protection of public health.
The decision four decades ago came in a case that challenged the FDA’s authority to regulate as a drug a testing disc used to guide antibiotic therapy. The legal kerfuffle predates a 1976 law that spelled out the agency’s authority over medical devices.
The Supremes ruled the agency could treat the disc as a drug, reversing a lower court’s view, and in the process affirmed the FDA’s wide latitude in pursuing its mission.
As the Supremes put it:
[W]e are all the more convinced that we must give effect to congressional intent in view of the well accepted principle that remedial legislation such as the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act is to be given a liberal construction consistent with the Act’s overriding purpose to protect the public health….
From there, it’s not a big leap for FDA to regulate Cheerios as a drug.
Rise in uncompensated care forces hospital cuts
MinnPost.com’s Dr. Kay Schwebke reported that uncompensated care — both charity care and bad debt taken on by hospitals to fulfill moral and legal obligations — has climbed at “unprecedented rates” in Minnesota as folks lose insurance through layoffs or employer cutbacks or otherwise can’t afford out-of-pocket expenses and high deductibles.
In Minnesota, uncompensated care made up about 2.1 percent ($247.4 million) of hospital operating expenses in 2007, up from 1.6 percent ($128.7 million) in 2003, and there are indications that those numbers are rising.
Driven in large part by uncompensated care, “net hospital income fell from a positive 4.8 percent in third quarter 2007 to a negative 2.5 percent in third quarter 2008,” Schwebke reported.
Schwebke also looked at what these decreases meant in terms of layoffs, cutbacks and the availability of charity care at the state’s largest hospitals.
Toxicologists: Media gets chemical risks wrong
Filed under: Health journalism, Hot Health Headline
Writing for STATS, a research organization affiliated with George Mason University, Robert Lichter reports on a study of “how experts view the risks of common chemicals” that says “the media are overstating risk,” according to toxicologists.
Based on the survey responses of about 1,000 industry and academic toxicologists, the study was conducted by STATS, The Center for Health and Risk Communication at George Mason University, and the Society of Toxicology.
According to the survey, toxicologists say the news media overstates risk. Among the media, TV networks get the worst rap, the print media does slightly better and public broadcasting is seen as doing the best “with ‘only’ two out of three toxicologists describing PBS and NPR as overstating chemical risk.”
Also among the survey’s findings:
- Toxicologists “tend to downplay the dangers to human health” from chemicals and only a minority of them find cosmetics (one in four) or food additives (one in three) to be particularly risky. The majority saw more risk in pesticides and endocrine disruptors.
- Almost all say the amount of a toxin matters more than its mere presence, and deny that organic/natural products are inherently safer.
- Most agree that the regulatory system’s doing a good job, but that the media and regulators aren’t doing enough to accurately communicate with the public on these issues.
- In a sidebar titled “The Internet - a sober corrective to unruly journalists?” Trevor Butterworth reveals that toxicologists viewed WebMD and Wikipedia as far more accurate than mainstream media like The New York Times.
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Health Journalism 2010, AHCJ's annual conference, features a world-class program with story ideas, sources, stronger reporting skills, chances to meet newsmakers and network with other journalists.
- Health and education: Covering these intersecting beats
- Reporting on the business of health care
- Health reporting resources for journalists on state and local government beats
- Shortened Lives: How location, lifestyle affect health
- Covering a complex story for the long haul
- Aging in the 21st Century: Presentations and tip sheets
- AHCJ calls for better information from Joint Commission Web site
