KQED takes stock of food safety measures
California public radio station KQED explored food inspection and safety at all levels of the process, from producer to consumer, in a package rich with audio and multimedia.
Specific topics addressed in the package include:
- Federal plans to reform the food safety system
- The safety of leafy greens, and the impact of possible federal regulations upon that sector of the agriculture industry
- A snapshot of the work of a health inspector in the California Bay Area
- A primer on consumer health safety and a separate segment addressing the rarely discussed dangers of growing your own food
- Food-safety issues related to both recreational and commercial fishing
AHCJ resources
Tip Sheets
- Lifting the shroud: Using multiple-cause-of-death data
- Melamine: A primer on the contamination of food
Article
Documentary tonight examines health care system
Filed under: Government, Health care reform, Health policy
The documentary “Money-Driven Medicine,” based on a 2006 book of the same name by Maggie Mahar, will air tonight on PBS’ Bill Moyers Journal.
The film looks at effective care vs. more expensive care and “how our 2.6 trillion dollar a year healthcare system went so terribly wrong and what it will take to fix it.” It discusses access to health care, failures in treating chronic disease, the shortage of primary-care physicians, the undermining of the doctor-patient relationship and more. It includes a number of experts and comments from Barack Obama and George W. Bush.
Check the PBS schedule to find out when Moyer’s show airs in your area.
(Hat tip to Gary Schwitzer)
FDA drug-monitoring system tricky, promising
Filed under: Hot Health Headline, Pharmaceuticals, Public health, Studies
Doctors Jerry Avorn and Sebastian Schneeweiss write in the New England Journal of Medicine that the Sentinel Network the FDA is working on to track and make sense of decades of detailed prescription and drug exposure data holds promise for discovering drug interactions, but that the potential for false positives and misleading results is significant enough to make the program ineffective or dangerous if implemented improperly.
Related
Based on currently available data, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 71,000 Americans under the age of 18, most of them toddlers, visited the hospital for accidental medication overdoses. Common culprits included drugs like Tylenol, Xanax, Percodan and Aspirin. The report’s authors speculate that such poisonings are on the rise because more folks are taking multiple medications at home.
(hat tip to Consumer Reports)
CJR: Where did ‘death panels’ come from?
Filed under: Government, Health care reform, Health journalism, Health policy, Hot Health Headline, Public health, Studies
AHCJ president Trudy Lieberman, writing for CJR.org, traced rumors of “death panels” in the Obama reform plan back to radio appearances and op-ed pieces by a familiar face, former politician and academic Betsy McCaughey.
Betsy McCaughey
McCaughey first gained prominence when her notorious New Republic article “No Exit” helped submarine the Clintons’ health reform proposal in the early ’90s. Lieberman explains that the widely misinterpreted provision in the health reform proposal is actually just an expansion of a process put in place by the first Bush administration in which, once every five years, Medicare will reimburse patients for visits with medical professionals to discuss what kind of end-of-life care the patient chooses. (See McCaughey’s explanation on The Daily Show and New York Times blog post about the appearance.)
In a related piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, Greg Marks reviewed academic research to explain just how difficult it is to chase mythical creations like “death panels” from the national consciousness. “Once factually inaccurate ideas take hold in people’s minds,” Marx writes, “there are no reliable strategies to dislodge them — especially from the minds of those for whom the misinformation is most ideologically convenient.”
Finally, also in CJR, Megan Garber documents the sheer absurdity of the town hall shenanigans and spices up the account with a few choice examples and ends with the conclusion that our only hope may be to try “to ensure that the facts will simply make more noise than the fictions.”
What really happened at Memorial after Katrina?
Filed under: Health journalism, Hospitals, Hot Health Headline
In a story that is being co-published by The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica, Sheri Fink, M.D., painstakingly reconstructed the hectic, troubling events that transpired at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans in the days after Hurricane Katrina swept through the city. In that time, 45 patients died at the center – more than at any comparable hospital in the area – and, although a grand jury did not issue any indictments in relation to the deaths, there are indications that some of the deceased patients may have been euthanized.
Fink “obtained previously unavailable records and interviewed dozens of people who were involved in the events at Memorial and the investigation that followed.” She writes that more medical professionals and more patients were involved than previously thought and that “Several were almost certainly not near death when they were injected, according to medical professionals who treated them at Memorial and an internist’s review of their charts and autopsies that was commissioned by investigators but never made public.”
In addition to the doctors, nurses and patients involved in the controversial deaths, Fink also tells the story of the coroner and investigators charged with untangling the post-Katrina events at Memorial Medical Center and how they struggled to administer justice while taking into account the extraordinary circumstances that followed the hurricane.
The extensive package includes a video interview with Fink about how her background as a physician, humanitarian aid workers and previous reporting on medical care in wartime conditions helped her report this story.
Kleyman: Reform scare tactics hurt ethnic elders
Filed under: Health care reform, Health policy, Hot Health Headline
Paul Kleyman of New America Media about a cruel twist: the “death panels” label propagated by some extremists may serve to scare away the people who would benefit most from the end-of-life care the much-maligned provisions are designed to organize. Kleyman writes that “fear mongering” in the health care debate will hit ethnic elders with particular force because “apprehensive about past racism in the health care system, many elders of color may be further deterred from taking advantage of opportunities to plan ahead and optimize their ability to leave this life with a sense of dignity and control.”
Older African Americans and Latinos are also more likely than whites to find themselves in ICUs during the last six months of their lives, a disparity that Kleyman says shows just how much elders in those communities need end-of-life planning assistance.
New America Media is a collaboration between and advocacy group for more than 2,000 ethnic media outlets in the United States.
U.S. turned a ‘blind eye’ to organ trafficking
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Hot Health Headline
ProPublica’s Emily Witt has attempted to figure out how the live-donor organ trafficking scheme exposed in the recent massive New Jersey corruption bust could operate under the radar for more than a decade.
The secret, Witt finds, is a system that obscured lax enforcement and doctor-patient confidentiality and papered over with a thin facade of manufactured emotional connection between donor and recipient. Witt also looks at just how prevalent organ trafficking is in the United States and consults with an expert who says she notified feds about the New Jersey racket years before it was finally exposed as part of the larger corruption probe.
McKenna, Dockser Marcus awarded fellowships
AHCJ members Maryn McKenna and Amy Dockser Marcus are among the 10 Dart Center Ochberg Fellows, named by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.
Ochberg Fellowships are awarded to mid-career journalists who have covered issues ranging from street crime, family violence and natural disasters to war and genocide.
According to the Dart Center, the weeklong program offers journalists the opportunity to learn from experts in the many dimensions of trauma and to forge relationships with colleagues who share their interests. Fellows attend several days of seminars and participate in the annual conference of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
McKenna, an independent journalist and author based in Minneapolis, was recently elected to AHCJ’s board of directors. Dockser Marcus is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Wall Street Journal and an author.
Schwitzer: One-sided push for screening wrong
On his Schwitzer health news blog, University of Minnesota journalism professor, HealthNewsReview.org editor and AHCJ member Gary Schwitzer reminds journalists – in particular, CNN’s Howard Kurtz and Larry King – that even when you’re talking to prostate cancer survivors about screening for the disease, it’s “wrong to use a network television platform to give one-sided advice to an entire population of men without giving balancing information on harms.”
Reminding journalists that PSA screening might not always be a good thing, Schwitzer quotes the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force:
Potential harms from PSA screening include additional medical visits, adverse effects of prostate biopsies, anxiety, and overdiagnosis (the identification of prostate cancer that would never have caused symptoms in the patient’s lifetime, leading to unnecessary treatment and associated adverse effects). Much uncertainty surrounds which cases of prostate cancer require treatment and whether earlier detection leads to improvements in duration or quality of life.
Parikh: HuffPo + Northrup = half-baked story
Filed under: Health journalism, Hot Health Headline
In a continuation of his critique of the Huffington Post’s health coverage, Dr. Rahul Parikh chastises the online news outlet and Oprah Winfrey favorite Dr. Christiane Northrup for a story Northrup posted trumpeting the “paradigm shift” brought about by the “exciting new” findings of what seems to be a 2006 study that showed large doses of vitamin D might decrease the risk of developing breast cancer. She called the study “preventative medicine at its finest.”
Parikh notes that while the study cited by Northrup does appear to support her claims, it was an observational study inconsistent with later research. Furthermore, the doses of vitamin D given in the study were twice the recommended allowance, thus increasing the risk of kidney-and-bone-damaging overdoses.
Parikh also questions Northrup’s recommendation that women “can even visit a tanning salon that offers UVB tanning rays,” for reasons which should be all too obvious.
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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
