EPA never tested playground material’s safety
Filed under: Government, Public health, Public records
Andrew Schneider reports on a investigation by the advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility that found the EPA, in response to an Freedom of Information request, admitted that it “has not conducted research to evaluate children’s ‘health effects’ from tire crumb constituents,” despite their use in playgrounds and athletic fields across the country.
On his blog Cold Truth,
Schneider reports that “benzene, arsenic, cadmium, formaldehyde, lead, chromium and scores of other toxic material” is found in most waste rubber, and that long-term exposure could be harmful for children and athletes.
Universities unite to present research to consumers
Thirty-five top universities, including many of North America’s leading research institutions, have banded together to create Futurity.org, a site designed to bypass the media and present their research directly to the public. According to Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed, each institution contributed $2,000 to help get the site started.
Paul Rogers of the San Jose Mercury News, reports that the site will function as a sort of social media wire service, intended to feed cleaned-up press releases to social media sites like Twitter and MySpace as well as news aggregators like Google News. Rogers found that the universities were turning to new media because of what they said was a decline in reliable science reporting.
Curtis Brainard of Columbia Journalism Review points to an important potential issue:
Labeling and transparency, however, are likely to become even greater issues for Futurity once it finalizes its syndication deals with Google News and Yahoo News. If that happens, its posts will be listed online next to similar items from traditional outlets like the Associated Press or The New York Times, making differentiation vitally important.
Journals pay for cracking down on industry funding
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Health journalism, Hot Health Headline, Studies
Paul Basken reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education that major medical journals, whose financial viability often depends heavily upon industry support, are faced with an “inherent conflict of interest” when it comes to filtering possible industry bias from their articles.
Basken’s report relies on an analysis of industry-funded studies presented at the International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication in Vancouver. Once the Journal of the American Medical Association introduced an independent verification requirement for industry-funded studies in 2005, Basken reported, it “saw the percentage of industry-supported studies in its pages drop 21 percent, from more than 60 percent of its published trials to 47 percent. Lancet, however, saw a growth of 17 percent, and The New England Journal of Medicine had an increase of 11 percent, the group reported.”
Profile: Gawande’s self doubt gives writing nuance
Filed under: Health care reform, Health journalism
Harvard Magazine’s Elizabeth Gudrais looks at Dr. Atul Gawande’s Obama-approved work at the New Yorker and explores how and why a Massachusetts endocrine surgeon has become one of the most influential writers in today’s health care reform debate. Gudrais follows his writing career from his start at Slate.com to The New Yorker and the now-infamous town of McAllen, Texas, and examines how Gawande’s own “neurotic self-doubt” has helped his work hit the all the right chords in a nation going through its own period of health care soul-searching.
Oransky on H1N1, pandemic, vaccination and 1976
Filed under: Health journalism, Hot Health Headline, Public health
AHCJ board member Ivan Oransky appeared on Brian Lehrer Live to discuss H1N1. The relevant segment starts at about 38:50 into the show.
Among the issues discussed:
- Why H1N1 is a “pandemic,” what that really means, and how the designation has affected the public perception of the outbreak.
- The effectiveness of the widespread adoption of hand sanitizers, especially in the context of flu and other viral outbreaks.
- Vaccination and the lessons/relevance of the 1976 swine flu “outbreak,” in which the vaccine turned out to be more dangerous than the actual flu.
- The level of immunity created by the first wave of H1N1 earlier this year.
- Media behavior during this outbreak, and the media’s responsibility to communicate as much information as possible without being “sensationalist.”
Decoding Obama’s message; highlighting coverage
Filed under: Health care reform, Health journalism, Hot Health Headline
AHCJ president Trudy Lieberman writes at CJR.org that, in his speech last week, President Barack Obama didn’t put anything new on the table, he just arranged the existing place settings to make them look more palatable to three key groups of constituents: the insured, the uninsured and those on Medicare.
In other words, the public option, should it exist, will be very limited, there will be an individual coverage mandate and Medicare won’t be footing any of the reform bill. Lieberman ends her column with the polite request that the media not allow itself to be sidetracked by South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” outburst and instead focus on how the president’s proposals would affect their readers.
In a related piece, Lieberman took the time to praise two outlets which managed to squeeze past all the political posturing and report on the real issues surrounding health care reform. The Kansas City Star’s Diane Stafford looked for answers to hard questions about the enforcement of an individual insurance mandate, while Kaiser News Service’s Jordan Rau explained just how expensive the individually mandated coverage could be.
As part of her ongoing Who will be at the Table series, Lieberman points out that Gun Owners of America, the NRA’s smaller rival, is opposing current reform proposals because they’re afraid gun-related medical information would end up in a national health database, and because they’re wary of an individual insurance mandate.
In another report, Lieberman posted the results of her interviews with another group, small business owners and employees in a Midwest college town, who sounded unsure about whether they were even at the table or not.
Baucus releases ‘Healthy Future Act’
As expected, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D‐Mont.) released that committee’s health reform proposal, called America’s Healthy Future Act, today. In a press release Baucus says, “We worked to build a balanced, common‐sense package that ensures quality, affordable coverage and doesn’t add a dime to the deficit.”
- Press release: Baucus Releases America’s Healthy Future Act
- Text of America’s Healthy Future Act
- Congressional Budget Office analysis of the America’s Healthy Future Act
- Joint Committee on Taxation analysis of the America’s Healthy Future Act
CNN breaks down key points of the bill. On NPR’s health blog, Scott Hensley points to what’s included and what isn’t. The New York Times‘ David M. Herszenhorn blogged from Baucus’ press briefing. William Branigin, Lori Montgomery and Shailagh Murray of The Washington Post report that Baucus has not been able to get a public endorsement from any Republicans, despite “more than 100 hours of meetings over several weeks with a bipartisan group of Senate health-care negotiators known as the ‘Gang of Six’.” Derek Thompson of The Atlantic asks “Does anybody actually like the Baucus health care bill?”
MRSA project earns AHCJ member an award
The National Association of Science Writers awarded AHCJ member Michael Berens the Science in Society Journalism Award for his part in the November 2008 series “Culture of Resistance,” a tale of the spread of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) through Washington that Berens wrote with fellow Seattle Times reporter Ken Armstrong. Berens and Armstrong uses databases and public records to chronicle the resistant bacteria’s rapid spread.
The press release quoted a judge as praising their work thus: “Although we’re awarding for local coverage, I think this piece has also had a rather profound national impact as well.”
NYT investigates Clean Water Act violations
Filed under: Government, Health data, Hot Health Headline, Public records
In the latest installment of The New York Times‘ Toxic Waters series, Charles Duhigg says that, for this investigation, the Times “compiled a national database of water pollution violations that is more comprehensive than those maintained by states or the E.P.A.” (That database can be found here.)
In that database, Duhigg found serious violations across the country, from wells tainted by wet manure used to fertilize fields to seashores soiled by runoff from overwhelmed sewer systems, and discovered that while 60 percent of Clean Water Act violations were judged to be serious, only 3 percent “resulted in fines or significant punishment.”
The investigation found that agencies at every level of government had contributed to what amounts to a national failure to enforce the Clean Water Act. The causes of this failure are every bit as diverse as its manifestations, with lack of agency funding and political pressure from powerful industries being the worst culprits.
Duhigg’s story touches on points across the country, but focuses on the particularly egregious violations of West Virginia mining companies. He also details the Environmental Protection Agency’s response to the investigation, as well as its plans for correcting the systematic problems revealed by the Times‘ database.
Related
- Paper’s investigation reveals contaminated drinking water
- Reporter finds efforts to monitor groundwater contamination leave much to be desired
AHCJ board names new officers
The AHCJ board of directors elected a new set of officers to take their seats at the upcoming fall board meeting.
Charles Ornstein of ProPublica was selected as president, Karl Stark of The Philadelphia Inquirer was named vice president, Ivan Oransky of Reuters Health was named treasurer and Julie Appleby of Kasier Health News was named secretary. Trudy Lieberman, board president for the past five years, assumes the new role of immediate past president.
A new board was seated after July elections by the entire AHCJ membership. The board members then voted on officers.
Other members of the board of directors are Felice J. Freyer of The Providence Journal; Phil Galewitz of Kaiser Health News; Andrew Holtz, a Portland, Ore., independent journalist; Carla K. Johnson of The Associated Press; Maryn McKenna, an independent journalist and author; Mike Stobbe of The Associated Press; and Irene Wielawski, an independent journalist from Pound Ridge, N.Y.
The Association of Health Care Journalists is an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing public understanding of health care issues. Its mission is to improve the quality, accuracy and visibility of health care reporting, writing and editing. AHCJ is housed at the Missouri School of Journalism.
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Awards for Excellence in Health Care JournalismDeadline: Feb. 3
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- Investigate health professionals and the boards that regulate them
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