Advocates urge clear ingredient lists for cleansers
Writing for the Associated Press, Jennifer Peltz covers a push by environmental advocates for clearer labeling that lists the ingredients of household cleansers. The article was spurred by a recent attempt by advocacy groups to get a court to use a 1971 New York law to force cleanser manufacturers into disclosing ingredients. Peltz also looks into the industry’s voluntary disclosure efforts (a trade group has linked to companies’ ingredient lists here) and various efforts to require full disclosure nationwide.
For its part, Peltz says industry representatives say “that the legal case is unwarranted, and that fears about health risks are misinformed.” Consumer advocates reply that current voluntary disclosures can be too vague, and that only government regulation will enable the sort of full disclosure necessary to ensure consumer safety.
If advocates win the New York case, cleanser contents would then have to be disclosed to the state. Other regulation efforts are significantly more ambitious.
The case comes amid growing concerns about potential toxins lurking in consumer goods, from the heavy metal cadmium in jewelry to the chemical bisphenol A in baby bottles. While lawyers argued the cleaning-products case in New York, a Senate subcommittee in Washington held a hearing to examine current science on the public’s exposure to toxic chemicals.
Some studies have linked cleaning product components to asthma, antibiotic resistance, hormone changes and other health problems. The industry’s major trade group, the Soap and Detergent Association, assails the research as flawed, says the products are safe if used correctly and notes that cleaning can itself help stop the spread of disease.
Federal environmental laws don’t require most household cleaning products to list their ingredients, though there are congressional proposals to change that. The Consumer Product Safety Commission requires hazard warning labels on some cleansers, and the National Institutes of Health offer some health and safety information for hundreds of cleaning products, drawn from data gathered for industrial use.
Related HHS product database
The National Institutes of Health maintains a database of health and safety information related to household products. It includes detailed information on ingredients and potential safety hazards, among other things.
‘Gold mine’ of workplace toxicity data released
Filed under: Health data, Hot Health Headline, Public health, Public records
After a long FOIA battle that ended with a federal lawsuit, Adam Finkel, former OSHA director of health standards programs for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (bio and contact information), has “acquired data on some three million samples, taken at about 75,000 locations from 1979 to 2009,” the Center for Public Integrity reports as part of its “Data Mine” series.
The air and “wipe” samples in question were taken to determine workplace exposure to toxic substances. Finkel plans to analyze this data “gold mine” and make it available to the public in an easily digestible format (a project for which he has already secured grant money). At some point, OSHA itself may do the same.
Asked if OSHA plans to make the sampling data public, agency spokeswoman Diana Petterson responded in an e-mail that “it is under consideration and must address certain concerns including the data integrity and the completeness of the data.” Finkel, who left OSHA after accusing the agency of failing to test its own inspectors for dangerous levels of beryllium, is skeptical. “They made it as hard as they possibly could,” he said. “This database is up to 30 years old, and they’ve shown no interest in making it accessible or doing anything useful with it internally.”
The Data Mine series, a collaboration between The Center for Public Integrity and the Sunlight Foundation, will highlight inaccessible or poorly presented information from the federal government.
From the CIA to the CDC, we’ll be looking at data that needs to be public, with regular posts on the Center’s and Sunlight’s websites. We’ll describe each data set, as well as officials’ plans for putting it online – or not.
Reporters chronicle the death of a sugary drink tax
With a classic tale of powerful established interests, millions and millions of dollars and savvy lobbying, Chicago Tribune reporters Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger draw our attention to the news vacuum that has formed where debate over a sugary drink tax used to be. From its optimistic beginnings to its eventual slow strangulation, Hamburger and Geiger track the rise and fall of the push to tax sugary drinks in order to discourage poor dietary choices and help fund health care reform.
The reporters do a wonderful job of chronicling every lobbying pressure point pushed by the industry, from faux grassroots to industry alliances to muli-million-dollar advertising campaigns. Here’s a small sample of their overview:
The White House has dismissed the idea, however, even after President Barack Obama had expressed interest last summer. A key congressional committee, though initially seeming receptive, ended up refusing to consider it. Several minority advocacy groups, including some committed to fighting obesity, lined up against the tax after years of receiving financial support from the industry.
…..
Meanwhile, beverage lobbyists attacked several nutrition scientists, accusing them of bias and distorting available evidence. The beverage industry also financed research that reached conclusions favorable to its position.
(Hat tip to Audrea Huff of the Orlando Sentinel’s Fitness Center blog)
Mumps outbreak hits more than 1,500 in N.Y., N.J.
More than 1,500 cases of mumps in New York and New Jersey have prompted the CDC to update the public on the outbreak in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
According to the CDC, the outbreak appears to have originated with an 11-year-old boy who returned from a trip to the United Kingdom and then attended a summer camp for observant Jewish boys. The illness was transmitted to other attendees and staff members and has since spread as those people returned home. The CDC says 97 percent of the people with mumps “are members of the tradition-observant Jewish community.”
Child with mumps (Photo: Public Health Image Library)
The CDC’s report includes information about how many of the people found to have mumps have been vaccinated - 88 percent had received one dose and 75 percent had received two doses.
The CDC says that, since 1967, when the mumps vaccine was licensed, to the early 2000s, the number of reported cases has gone from 186,000 to less than 500 annually but points out that “the effectiveness of the mumps component of the MMR vaccine is lower than that of the measles and rubella components.”
“The CDC hypothesized that the relatively closed social world of the communities and the large family sizes within them have played a role in preventing the disease from spreading further,” according to a brief from the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.
Patients must sort, evaluate online health advice
On O’Reilly Radar, Brian Ahier reviews various efforts to help patients sort through the reams of health information online and to come up with something useful and credible.
Ahier includes an in-depth look at The Decision Tree, a new book by Thomas Goetz. Goetz walks patients through a data-driven approach to health decisions, focusing on the three pillars of early action, data reliance and openness.
“One of the themes of the book is that by knowing and better understanding our genetic makeup, we can improve the medical decision making process.” Ahier’s article includes a decision-tree widget that asks the consumer a series of questions and offers some information.
Ahier also squeezes in a reference to Susannah Fox’s Pew Internet commentary on search engines and health information. According to Fox, “two-thirds of consumer health inquiries start at a general search engine” and that number is growing steadily. Given their importance in the health information market, Fox says, search engines have focused on ways to deliver the most reliable and relevant information to consumers.
Among other things, Fox addresses Google’s effort to “guide consumers to safe, trusted health websites,” including this insight from Roni Zeiger of Google Health on just how this is done:
For this health search feature we decided to offer users one source each from a governmental health agency, a medical institution, and a commercial site. We’ll study how users like these choices and continue to iterate. None of these sites is paying any money to Google to be included in the feature. Google is 100% committed to ranking websites objectively to provide the most relevant information to users. Websites cannot pay for higher search rank.
Comments invited on latest draft of DSM
A new version of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has come out every decade or so (it varies widely) since 1952. 
It hasn’t substantially changed since 1994, but the next revision is slated to come out in 2013. It’s a pretty big event, as the book’s diagnostic criteria are used around the world to determine who is diagnosed with mental disorders.
With the release of the new version, lines may shift and folks who were diagnosed with mental disorders may find themselves “undiagnosed.” Others will have labels changed and gain labels they didn’t have before.
The latest draft proposal of the May 2013 revisions, upon which public comment will be accepted until April 20, 2010, was posted on Feb. 9. APA workgroups will review the comments and begin trials soon after. Benedict Carey rounded up and evaluated some of the biggest proposed changes for The New York Times. In addition to bipolar disorders in children and autism spectrum disorders, Carey discusses the sheer significance of the changes.
“Anything you put in that book, any little change you make, has huge implications not only for psychiatry but for pharmaceutical marketing, research, for the legal system, for who’s considered to be normal or not, for who’s considered disabled,” said Dr. Michael First, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University who edited the fourth edition of the manual but is not involved in the fifth.
“And it has huge implications for stigma,” Dr. First continued, “because the more disorders you put in, the more people get labels, and the higher the risk that some get inappropriate treatment.”
FCC’s broadband plan includes wireless health tech
The Federal Communications Commission will release a report next month outlining a national broadband plan that is expected to include measures for promoting and facilitating the use of mobile devices in health care, Mary Mosquera of Goverment Health IT reports. The plan was mandated as part of the stimulus package.
The FCC plan will describe “where government has a role to reduce some of the hurdles to these technologies both in connectivity and to promote innovation in applications,” said Dr. Mohit Kaushal, digital healthcare director of the FCC’s Omnibus Broadband Initiative.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act called for the FCC to develop a plan for establishing broadband connections to the Internet as a way to spur business development, job creation and improvements in healthcare.
To demonstrate a few possible uses of such technology, Mosquera also talks to organizations, hospitals and doctors who are taking advantage of current resources.
Lieberman: Media bought into heart docs’ fight
Filed under: Health care reform, Health journalism, Hot Health Headline
Using one-sided sentences published by newspapers nationwide as evidence, AHCJ Immediate Past President Trudy Lieberman takes her media peers to task on CJR.com for blindly advancing the agenda of the American College of Cardiology in their push against Medicare reimbursement cuts.
The ACC aggressively fought what Lieberman describes as “a new Medicare rule, which took effect January 1, that cut projected total revenues for cardiologists by 13 percent on average over four years while increasing the revenue of internists, family doctors, and general practitioners.” Lieberman writes that the rule change will effectively put more money toward much-needed primary care specializations and that it was widely mischaracterized in the press, thanks to ACC’s machinations. Lieberman:
… for the most part (news articles) passed along the cardiologists’ complaints, threats, and warnings without any hint that there was another side to the story. Between the slanted newspaper articles and audio news releases from the ACC, millions of Americans learned that the incomes of heart doctors, which can be upwards of $400,000, could take a hit.
Florida keeps doctors’ arrests, convictions offline
Health News Florida’s Carol Gentry reports on health department disclosure of the arrest of medical professionals, writing “It’s the policy of Florida’s Department of Health not to post public information about arrests and convictions until a professional licensing board takes final action, no matter how long that takes.”
The department has a consumer-oriented site designed to notify Florida residents of disciplined physicians, but Gentry writes that it doesn’t even include already-public records and often fails to post issues until long after they have occurred. A representative told Gentry that their procedure was to not make information public while “due process is going on,” and added that if consumers wanted that information they were welcome to call the health department.
In a follow-up story, Gentry reports that attorneys who defend doctors in disciplinary matters think the Department of Health’s stance is “entirely appropriate.” But a consumer advocacy group says the public has a right to know about complaints. As Gentry points out, “It can take years to resolve pending cases, especially if the professional contests the case or if there is a backlog.”
Parikh examines media’s role in vaccine-autism link
In his latest dispatch, Salon.com contributor and pediatrician Rahul Parikih describes the media as the willing enablers of the decade of hysteria brought about by what he describes as “Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s now infamous study linking the MMR vaccine to autism.” Parikh starts by describing exactly how Wakefield artfully manipulated the media from the beginning:
The anti-vaccine hysteria, after all, began like so many other big stories: with a press conference. That’s where Andrew Wakefield first staked his claim that the MMR vaccine caused autism, according to Paul Offit’s book, “Autism’s False Prophets.” Wakefield wasn’t flanked by doctors or hospital officials but by P.R. folks he had hired himself. “One case of [autism] is too many,” he said. “It’s a moral issue for me, and I can’t support the continued use of [the MMR vaccine] until this issue has been resolved.”
The problem, of course, is that a news conference loads a gun that the media usually pulls the trigger on: Headlines like “Ban Three-in-One Jab, Doctors Urge” started rolling off the presses. While measles made a tragic resurgence, few reporters attempted to scrutinize Wakefield or his audacious claim.
Finger successfully pointed, Parikh then goes on to analyze, with the help of AHCJ member Gary Schwitzer, exactly how the media was duped. He finds that it comes down to the fact that science is pretty complicated stuff, while the news cycle is not.
Frankly, progress in science and medicine occurs much more slowly than the news cycle can tolerate. “Science,” says Schwitzer, “is like a slow winding stream. It has ebbs and flows, and twists and changes in its path that, if you don’t follow, can fool you. But too many reporters, unfortunately, like to dip their toe in the water, run back and report about it without following that river to where it leads.”
Parikh also blames the reporters’ technique of adding “balance” to a story by including opposing opinions that may come from discredited fringe elements, but adds that it’s not entirely the media’s fault.
The Lancet, one of the world’s most well-known medical publications, played an enormous role here, showing us how medical journals are at risk for their own kinds of malpractice. Offit’s “False Prophets” details how Richard Horton, then the journal’s editor in chief, seemed enamored of the notion of publishing something muckraking. As Offit writes, “By ignoring the criticisms of several reviewers, the warnings of an accompanying editorial, Wakefield’s history of holding press conferences, a British press primed for controversy, and a public distrustful of pubic health officials, Richard Horton allowed the public to question the safety of a vaccine based on flimsy, irreproducible data. The loss of the public trust that followed was entirely predictable.”
Parikh ends his piece on a positive note, praising Brian Deer’s investigations into Wakefield’s research in The Sunday Times (of London).
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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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