Foe of degree mills sets sights on medical school
David Wolman, writing in Wired, chronicles the efforts of an Illinois physics professor, George Gollin (bio), to topple a $7 million fake-degree empire. It’s a fun story, and well worth a read, but the part that will most interest health journalists pops up at the very end: The professor who took down the operation that granted about 9,600 fake degrees used by everyone from schoolteachers to Bush White House staffers is now looking into what he thinks is a phony online medical school.
Wolman ends with this sketch of the professor at work:
He erases equations from a blackboard and scribbles a spider’s web of names, notes, and online sites all relating to an outfit called St. Luke School of Medicine, which he believes sells bogus medical degrees. “You get a real rise out of people when you talk about fake MDs,” he says.
The outfit in question, St. Luke School of Medicine, has now posted a message announcing it’s no longer accepting new students. However, if Gollin’s previous work (in his own words) is any indication, St. Luke is probably just one entry point into a universe of dubious medical degrees.
NOTE: As the Wired story makes clear, media outlets played a major role in the effort to expose the first diploma mill, especially by shaming public institutions into investigating and prosecuting the offenders. Reporters like The Spokesman-Review’s Bill Morlin and Jim Camden helped connect the dots and expose the full reach of the story.
Airport dining proves to be a food safety challenge
Filed under: Hot Health Headline, Public health, Public records
USA Today’s Alison Young reviewed inspection reports for hundreds of restaurants at 10 airports and found a large number of critical violations, including 42 percent of the restaurants reviewed at Seattle-Tacoma and 77 percent of restaurants reviewed at Reagan National Airport.
The most common culprits? “Grab-and-go” sandwiches and related foods, which aren’t kept cold enough to ward off food-borne pathogens.
Young notes that it’s hard to pinpoint the number sickened by airport sandwiches, as it’s difficult to track foodborne illness back to a specific source even when the customers aren’t constantly boarding airplanes and taking off for all corners of the earth.
Scott Hensley, on NPR’s Shots blog, recently noted an FDA warning to a Denver kitchen that prepared thousands of meals a day for airlines:
We can sum up the findings in the LSG SkyChefs facility a few months back with a four-letter abbreviation used to describe the roaches and other insects found there: TNTC.
That stands for Too Numerous To Count.
Hensley runs down some of the other problems found there and a reaction from the company spokeswoman.
AHCJ resources
Lifting the shroud: Using multiple-cause-of-death data
Fatal Food: A study of illness outbreaks
Recent news
Loophole allows E. coli-tainted meat to be sold
Meat, dairy products transported in unsafe temperatures, overlooked by inspectors
Airlines delay testing of onboard water
Salmonella outbreak: A selection of recent stories
N.Y. school districts not meeting federal guidelines on cafeteria inspections
Private companies, not the FDA, increasingly perform food safety inspections
Web sites
Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy
Outbreak Alert! Database
Reform bills would benefit Indian Health Service
Filed under: Government, Health care reform, Health policy
Mark Trahant, writing for InvestigateWest, points out that, because it’s in both the House and Senate versions of the bill and thus safe in conference committee, the reauthorization and extension of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act will pass as long as the larger reform package does.
The Parker Indian Health Services Hospital in Parker, Ariz. Photo by churl via Flickr.Originally enacted in 1976, the IHCIA has, in various iterations, been the primary vehicle for the delivery of health care to the country’s American Indians and Alaska Natives.
The latest version of the bill would adjust the Indian Health Service budget to account for medical inflation and population growth, increase efforts to recruit and retain health care professionals, introduce coverage for long-term care, improve youth suicide prevention programs and encourage innovation that will help provide easier access to health facilities.
List of lists: Top health stories of 2009
The end of the year brings us list after list of the best or top health and medical stories. Some of the more interesting:
USA Today: New bugs, scary food, bad drugs and a quiz: Test your knowledge of the year’s top health stories
HealthLeaders Media: 10 Weird Healthcare Stories of 2009
Fox News: Top Health Stories of 2009
Harvard Health Letter: The top health stories of 2009
CBS News: Top medical stories of 2009
ReportingonHealth’s William Heisel lists his favorite health stories of 2009
And a couple of organizations declared the end of the decade with their lists:
MSNBC.com: Top 10 health stories of the decade
Associated Content: Top Health Stories of the Decade and Why
Medical tourism expected to continue growth
Filed under: Health care reform, Hot Health Headline
The San Francisco Chronicle’s Carolyn Lochhead writes that the draw of medical tourism lies with both transparency and affordability and implies that its success shows the need for an overhaul of the U.S. medical system.
She also notes that the reform efforts don’t seem likely to change those two central systematic problems, and thus medical tourism is likely to be here to stay, at least in the foreseeable future. The piece also explores the consumer side of medical tourism, profiling an Oklahoma surgeon who competes on price and transparency.
The article also cites an executive who advises that the economics of going overseas for treatment start making sense when the American price tag for a procedure reaches about $15,000.
Resources
- Controversy follows medical tourism’s top couple
- Story examines risks, rewards for medical tourists
- Self-insured groups may encourage medical tourism
- Tip Sheet - Medical tourism: Trend or aberration
- Article - Health Journalism 2008: Medical tourism - trend or aberration?
- Role of the Internet in medical tourism
- Tip Sheet - Medical Tourism Takes Flight
Journal editor linked to spinal implant royalties
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Hot Health Headline
John Fauber of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel continues his coverage of conflicts of interest in medical research and journals with a look at journal editors. First, Fauber lays out the case in question:
- For seven years, a University of Wisconsin orthopedic surgeon (university bio | hospital bio) has been editor-in-chief of the Journal of Spinal Disorders & Techniques.
- During that time, he’s received more than $20 million in patent royalties thanks to spinal implants sold by Medtronic.
- Also during that time, an average of more than one Medtronic-related article appeared in each issue of the journal, most of them positive. Some were even co-authored by the editor/surgeon himself and related to the implant for which he gets royalties.
- Despite these coincidences, the journal never disclosed the potential conflict of interest.
Fauber then goes on to explore why journal editors aren’t mentioned more often in conflict-of-interest scandals, and then to explain exactly why those editors hold the sort of power that makes these conflicts particularly distressing. As Fauber explains, editors of medical journals can accept or reject manuscripts of studies involving drugs or devices - something that can make or break the product.
They can send a study out to peer reviewers who may be sympathetic to a particular drug or device by virtue of their own financial relationships with the companies that make those products. They can give authors more leeway to say positive things about a drug. They can turn down studies that say bad things about the product of a company they get money from.
The author of “On The Take: How Medicine’s Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health
Earlier coverage:
- Wis. researchers didn’t disclose conflicts to journals
- U. of Wisconsin conflict of interest policy gutted
- Wyeth paid university for ghostwritten articles
- University’s ties to testosterone therapy questioned
- Drug companies aim to sway docs through classes
- Wyeth-funded course promoted hormone therapy
- Academic docs collect money from manufacturers
In the cold, elderly more likely to break hip
USA Today’s Kim Painter reminds folks, especially the elderly, to practice “defensive walking” during winter months, citing a “decade-long study of 66,346 hip fractures in New York City found that, at least in that city, fracture rates were highest in winter, especially on the coldest and windiest days.”
At the same time, Painter reports, overall fall rates don’t seem to budge to much in the winter, perhaps because folks are more likely to stay inside rather than risk icy steps and walkways. Painter says the increased fracture rates could be because of icy streets, weaker muscles as a result of winter inactivity and even lower vitamin D levels, which have been linked to weak muscles and brittle bones.
Poynter’s Al Tompkins, who first alerted us to this story, also points to CDC resources on the “silent epidemic” of hip fractures in America.
AHCJ on Aging
AHCJ’s Aging in the 21st Century workshop, held Oct. 16 and 17 in Miami, addressed the changing picture of aging Americans and key research and issues related to this growing population. Tip sheets and presentations from that workshop are available to AHCJ members, as are these related tip sheets:
- Aging Nation: Troublesome Health Care Issues
- Headlines an advocate for seniors would like to see
- The impact of aging upon health care
- Covering nursing homes and other issues of aging
- How will retiring boomers affect the national health agenda?
- You Can Run, but You Can’t Hide: Policy and Problems in Long-Term Care
- Biology of Aging: Sources and Resources
Slim guide: Covering the Health of Local Nursing Homes
Check out AHCJ’s latest volume in its ongoing Slim Guide series. This reporting guide gives a head start to journalists who want to pursue stories about one of the most vulnerable populations – nursing home residents. It offers advice about Web sites, datasets, research and other resources. After reading this book, journalists can have more confidence in deciphering nursing home inspection reports, interviewing advocacy groups on all sides of an issue, locating key data, and more. The book includes story examples and ideas.
AHCJ publishes these reporting guides, with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to help journalists understand and accurately report on specific subjects.
Problem nurses move from state to state
Filed under: Health journalism, Hot Health Headline
ProPublica’s Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber have, with the help of the Los Angeles Times‘ Maloy Moore, released the final installment in their nurses series (full series: ProPublica | LA Times), this one focusing on how “caregivers with troubled records can cross state lines and work without restriction.” They found that a large number of these cross-state issues could be prevented if state regulators took advantage of readily available information.
By simply typing a nurse’s name into a national database, state officials can often find out within seconds whether the nurse has been sanctioned anywhere in the country and why. But some states don’t check regularly or at all.
The failure to act quickly in such cases has grave implications: Hospitals and other healthcare employers depend on state nursing boards to vouch for nurses’ fitness to practice.
The reporters found an army of examples, from the disturbing anecdote they lead with to the 117 California nurses whose licenses had been revoked, suspended, denied or surrendered elsewhere or the 10 nurses who were disciplined in Rhode Island, yet operated with clear licenses in neighboring Massachusetts.
Most of these transgressions are recorded in a federal database, as well as in one operated by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing. Both are incomplete, even though states are required to update the federal database within 30 days of a disciplinary action. And the federal database, while more complete, is rarely used, probably because it costs money while the state boards’ database is free. Some states only check these databases when licensing a nurse the first time, others rely on the nurses themselves to disclose their own problems. A handful check their nurse list against the database regularly, but they appear to be in the minority.
Gastel recognized for science communications
AHCJ member Barbara Gastel, M.D., M.P.H., has been selected to be the 2010 recipient of the John P. McGovern Science and Society Award, presented by the Scientific Research Society in recognition of outstanding contributions in communicating science.
Dr. Barbara Gastel
Gastel, a professor in the Veterinary Integrative Biosciences department at Texas A&M University, coordinates the university’s master’s degree program in science and technology journalism.
She wrote a primer on evidence-based medical reporting for AHCJ that helps journalists find, read and evaluate journal articles. She also has been a speaker on similar topics at AHCJ conferences.
Ifill digs into health reform lobbying money
PBS Newshour’s Gwen Ifill filed a report on the staggering sums of money spent on lobbying by various industries whose balance sheets are riding on the outcome of health care reform.
She leads with big numbers from the Center for Responsive Politics, including $400 million from the health care sector and $120 million from insurers in the first nine months of 2009 alone. To drive those numbers home, the Center’s Dave Levinthal even called it one of the “biggest lobbying efforts ever on a single piece of legislation that the United States has ever seen.”
According to Levinthal, health reform’s unique combination of a massive industry and a long, drawn-out process has created a sort of perfect storm for lobbyists. He added that, while strides have been made since the Abramoff days, lobbyists still have a long way to go in the transparency department. An analysis released by the center finds that “the senators who opposed the health insurance reform bill passed on Christmas Eve received an average of nearly 30 percent more political donations from political action committees and individual employees of health and health insurance-related groups and companies since 1989.”
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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
